


The Piano is Not Firewood Yet

by UselessLesbianLaughter



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Blood, Car Accidents, F/F, Graphic Depictions of Injury and medical scenes ig, Hospitals, Hurt/Comfort, Lena Luthor Knows Kara Danvers Is Supergirl, Major Character Injury, Medical Jargon, Near Death, Near Death Experiences, Slow Burn, SuperCorp, Trauma, call me a wannabe shonda rhimes i don't mind you're not wrong, i went off a little w the medical jargon you'll just have to live w that ig, or not im not ur mum, that's so sad alexa play chasing cars, vaguely post S4 ignoring CRISIS entirely bc i can
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-08
Updated: 2020-11-15
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:48:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 21,673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27446656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UselessLesbianLaughter/pseuds/UselessLesbianLaughter
Summary: “You know—” She should’ve stopped there, she should’ve stopped before the argument even took place. But she didn’t. She said, “Sometimes I wish I’d never met you. All we ever seem to do is hurt each other.”  It was one of those heat of the moment things you yell out just to see how bad it’ll make you feel. She wasn’t expecting Lena to storm off. But Lena got in her car and drove. Kara didn't follow. Kara went home.***It's midnight when the phone rings. There's an eternity between that and Kara receiving the news. Lena's at the hospital. She's been in a car accident. She's in critical condition, toeing the line between life and death.Kara's still her emergency contact.
Relationships: Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor
Comments: 118
Kudos: 599





	1. Follow the White Lines (keep my eyes on the road as i ache)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you to the wonderful, superb @sabulum-p on tumblr for beta reading

There is an eternity between her phone ringing and receiving the news. It doesn’t really register at first. Her body responds before her mind can. Her heart beats faster and harder, reverberating through her core, pulsating at the tips of her fingers. Her hands begin to shake and sweat. Her breaths become short and shallow and her ears start ringing. Her mind just clouds over for a moment, an error message, _we’ll be right back._

“Ms. Danvers, are you there?” the words echo through her phone. She’s not sure, she’ll have to check with herself at a later time to make sure.

As her mind grows clearer, she becomes real again and the world around her stops being. A cliché loop of ´ _This can’t be happening´_ worms its way into her brain, and it’s right, the earworm, this can’t be happening. This isn’t real. It’s a bad dream and this is the part where she wakes up. This is the scary part right before she wakes up, any second now she will trip and fall and wake up with a jolt. She takes a deep breath and closes her eyes and, opening them again, doesn’t wake up.

“Ms. Danvers?” the voice on the other end of the line grows more concerned, the worry in the tone grounding Kara the slightest bit, enough to force her to think of a response.

She mutters a breathy, “Yeah, yeah, I’m,” then trails off because she’s not quite sure what she is at the moment. The correct answer is “in disbelief.” It feels like an auditory delay, like watching a movie in a foreign language and the subtitles are a scene late, but things begin to click into place. _Lena, hospital. Lena, car._ _Car, accident._ It’s the way one explains picture books to a new-born, hoping something will click. She gathers herself enough to speak out of necessity.

“What-which hospital?” she breathes.

“NC General,” the voice echoes back. In a world before her phone rang, that voice would’ve been reassuring. This world, however, is a strange one and she’s not sure what is what here. What she does know, the only thing, really, is where she must go, so she goes. She’s there within the blink of an eye, failing to realise she just flew across town in civilian clothing. It really doesn’t matter. She rushes through the hospital, running full-force into the front desk, nearly toppling over and receiving a particularly disgruntled look from the nurse behind it.

“Lena Luthor,” she says, out of breath but stern, “can you tell me where she is?”

“Are you family?” the nurse asks, tapping something into her keyboard.

“Yes, I mean, no, I mean, I,” Kara stutters, abandoning the thought, abandoning the whole conversation as she hears a gurney being unloaded from an ambulance and rolled into the ER accompanied by a woman’s voice saying, “Female, mid-20s, GCS 12 in the field, now down to 7, vehicular collision, ejected through windshield, BP 90 over 50, tachy 120, sats 80%, chest contusion, multiple bone fractures, open tib-fib, hypovolemic en route.” And most of it is absolute gibberish but a woman, mid-20s, in a car crash is too specific to be a coincidence and surely enough, in a flash, she’s by the gurney, and surely enough, that’s Lena. Bloody and mangled but that’s Lena.

“I know her!” Kara exclaims, matching the speed of the hospital personnel, “I know her!”

Time seems to have sped up. There’s a lot of yelling before anyone even acknowledges Kara’s presence. “Out of the way! Move!” from her left. “She’s haemorrhaging” from her right. 

“You know the patient? Can you tell us her name?” a nurse responds with the stoic calm of a pre-historic boulder suspended in the middle of a raging ocean.

“Yes, yes, that’s my friend, Lena Luthor,” Kara says and blinking, flashes back. She finds herself in an immaculately decorated office, sitting side-by-side with Lena, facing a notary, ink drying in the shape of their signatures on the marble. It feels like there’s yelling coming from every direction, things that would make little sense to Kara even if she was registering words coherently. When she opens her eyes, she’s been asked a question and isn’t sure what it is, so she closes her eyes again and, without opening them, recites, “Lena Luthor, 27, blood type A+, no known allergies, takes Rozerem and iron supplements,” and opens her eyes and finally, breathes.

“I need a CT stat, call upstairs and tell them to prep an OR,” a doctor says, ignoring Kara.

“Thank you,” the nurse addresses her instead, “We need to contact her family, can you tell me anything about them?”

“No family, just me,” Kara breathes, shaking the tremors from her voice, going into crisis mode, the type of calm a firefighter feels rummaging through a burning house, “I’m her proxy. Any information, any decisions, you run it by me.”

“Alright, ma’am, and your name is?”  
  


“Kara Danvers,” she says her last name crystal clear and then her eyes drop down. And, much like Lena, she turns pale, the realisation pouring like blood back into her consciousness, “Oh god,” she breathes, her hands beginning to shake again, “is she going to be okay?”

“I need you to step aside, ma’am,” is not the answer she wants but the answer she gets anyway, with an added, barely comforting, “we’ll let you know.”

The race comes to a standstill with Lena in an exam room, lifted onto a stretcher on the count of three, obscured from Kara by a wall of doctors and nurses. There’s a lot being said but it all bleeds into one for Kara.

“Absent breath sounds on the right, set up a chest tube,” and “Hang three bags of A positive, get those IVs up,” and, “She’s becoming cyanotic. Get me an intubation tray,” and “No obvious spinal deformities,” and “Keep giving more fluids so she doesn’t get hypothermic,” and, “Checking reflexes,” and, “Anisocoria, left pupil fixed and dilated” and, “Depressed skull fracture with a probable bleed, start Mannitol and Dilatin,” and, “Sterile drapes and Betadine,” and in a flash, Lena’s being taken away and Kara tries to follow but doesn’t get far. A door is quite literally slammed in her face and she’s left with nothing to do but wait.

She does take her glasses off just for a moment only to see Lena being swallowed by a giant CT machine and sighs. Her heart is pounding out of her chest and she feels the need to sit down. She doesn’t remember ever being this nauseous, the image of Lena bleeding out seared into her mind. She’s not sure, sorely regretting the fact that she didn’t pay much attention in high school biology, she’s not sure if humans can bleed that much and survive, and is too afraid of the answer to try and find out.

A nurse takes her aside, followed by a blur of tracking down documents in this and that registry and when everything checks out, he tells her, “While you wait, you can stay in the Family Lounge or you could visit the cafeteria or the gift shop, there’s an interfaith chapel on the first floor if you’d like to pray. I would appreciate if I could get your phone number first so we can reach you and if anything happens, we’ll let you know,” there’s more after that but Kara has already disassociated. She mumbles her phone number and brushes the nurse aside and doesn’t go to the Family Lounge or the cafeteria or the gift shop or the interfaith chapel on the first floor. She stands perfectly still and does her best to breathe.

When she closes her eyes, it’s just Lena, not looking back at her, simply lying there, motionless, her head suspended between two abrasively orange foam blocks, her chin resting snugly on top of a neck brace of yellow and blue, slivers of glass shining from her skin as the fluorescent lights bounce off of them, her hair matted to her forehead with drying blood, the cuts in her cheek hinting at more than skin-deep, the blood, the blood, the _blood_ splattered all over her. It just keeps rewinding in her head like a broken DVD skipping and replaying the saddest scene in her favourite movie. This _is the part where she always cries, and_ this _is the part where it’s so scary she screams and_ this _is the part where she clutches onto Lena’s hand like an anchor and_ this _is the part where the movie is supposed to end and everything is supposed to be okay and everyone is supposed to go home laughing about it._

When she opens her eyes, Lena evaporates and a hospital appears and somehow that is worse. She needs to sit down, she needs to sit down or she will pass out, she needs to sit down like never before but there are no chairs around, the room is spinning, everything grows too loud until it explodes into a monotonous ringing in her ears, like a heart monitor flat-lining, loud enough to drown everything else out. In the monotone, the words of their last conversation flood back to her. Those cannot have been her last words to Lena. _Oh Rao. Oh fuck, oh Rao._ She needs to get her mind off of it or she’ll drown in the thought. She needs to move; she needs to go anywhere that isn’t here!

As she rushes through the busy hospital fruitlessly seeking something resembling sanctuary, she searches for a familiar face, hell, she’d take Lex, back from the dead, at this point, but finds none. Eventually, she finds herself in the maternity ward where pacing around is glared at but tolerated, periodically checking in on Lena who’s been moved into an OR by now, hesitant each time her hand reaches for her glasses to peer in through the walls but unable to stop. She winces each time she looks and can only tolerate the sight for a split second.

Lena’s sprawled out on an operating table, in a deeply unsightly position. She’d probably be rather upset if she wasn’t unconscious. She’s a mess. No, really, there’s blood all over her face and in that blood, there’s glass, someone really should attend to those lacerations, everyone’s rather busy trying to salvage her heart. The neurologist has been paged twice.

A part of her would be morbidly curious to see herself all splayed out like this. The circumstances are unfortunate, _yes_ , and all the blood is unsightly but Lena has always enjoyed taking things apart to see how they work and wouldn’t this be the ultimate expression of just that?

***

The accident had been quick, like a CliffsNotes version of life. Headlights, windshield, a moment suspended mid-air followed by hitting the ground. She bounced off the first time she did, and the second, third time’s the charm. It was a momentary explosion of sounds followed by utter, prolonged silence.

She was awake for all that, awake enough to dial 911 and mutter something half-comprehensive about her whereabouts. It was a miracle her phone had survived the fall with merely a crack in the screen.

She was awake lying there by the side of the road, watching her blood stain the grass in slow-motion, illuminated by the moonlight, flickering with the reflection of the flames engulfing her car somewhere in the distance. Waiting for shock to kick in, waiting for the ambulance to arrive, for someone to _fucking_ sedate her because shock wasn’t kicking in like it was supposed to and her leg was _definitely_ on wrong and her chest felt like it was going to explode and she was heaving and heaving and still, it felt like she wasn’t breathing. Her head was killing her, she couldn’t move her right arm, the left one was tingling and she’d never been this tired. Her heart was flopping out of her chest like a dying fish on dry land trying to make its way back to sea. She wanted to go to sleep, she wanted to be sick, she _just wanted to go home_. It felt like an eternity. Finally, the ambulance arrived in a flurry of flashing lights and sirens. A paramedic, blurrier than usual, asked for her name and age.

“Lena, 27,” she said, and promptly passed out.

Everything had gone dark after that, no white light at the end of a dark tunnel, no sounds from the outside, no loved ones not lost but gone before, just darkness, still and quiet like a deep sleep. There _is_ a moment of lucidity she could almost write off as an odd dream in which she finds herself conscious nowhere in particular with only the knowledge that this is a good place. This is a good place and she is safe here, she is loved here, and she is out of there as quickly as she arrived, plunged back into the warm embrace of the uncertainty of darkness.

***

She’s in surgery for hours which doesn’t make much of a difference to her but is agonising for Kara. When she got to the ER, it was around midnight. By the time Lena is being wheeled out of the OR on a stretcher, sunlight is seeping in through the windows, unusually abrasive on Kara’s bloodshot eyes. Her phone rings and it’s an earthquake with a magnitude greater than eight and she takes it anyway.

Lena’s in the Post-Anaesthesia Care Unit. She won’t be released to an inpatient room until her vital signs are stable, ideally not before she’s awake. The _ideally_ , all things considered, being the thorn on that rose, though Kara will gladly let her fingers bleed if only she could see her.

In a fraction of a second, she’s outside the PACU, her glasses dangling from her fingers. She spots Lena in a bed separated from other beds on both sides by a pair of flimsy blue curtains. She’s obscured by machinery and tubes, her features mangled and in her blue hospital gown, she’s almost indistinguishable from all the other patients in the large room, especially from a distance, but Kara would recognise her anywhere. Because it’s _Lena._

She wants to visit. Of course, she wants to visit immediately, she wants to be there when, _if_ Lena wakes up. She says as much but the voice at the other end of the phone tells her visitation is limited in the PACU and that Lena is not cleared for visitation yet. Kara wants to speak to a real person; she hasn’t had the best of luck with people telling her things over the phone today. She’s told a nurse will come by to take her to talk to Lena’s doctor and it’s one of those days when just about anything might as well happen so Kara waits for the nurse and one arrives, though not nearly quickly enough. It’s the same nurse that took her phone number and told her about gift shops and cafeterias and other such utter nonsense.

Without so much as a greeting, the first thing out of Kara’s mouth is “How’s she doing?” followed shortly by, “Is she going to be okay? Is she going to wake up?”

The nurse gives her a sympathetic nod that answers none of her questions and says, “We’re doing everything in our power.”

Well, that tells Kara nothing.

“Please, I just, can’t you just tell me how she’s doing?” she asks.

“Her vitals are stabilising but she’s pending further surgery. The doctor will give you a more in-depth explanation. Please, follow me.”

He leads Kara down a hallway that is far from narrow but feels like it’s closing in on Kara from all sides anyway. Her head has not stopped spinning. The nurse takes her aside and closes the curtains to shield them from the rest of the hospital.

The doctor is a middle-aged woman with greying dark hair and crow’s-feet around her eyes. She’s holding a chart; it can only be assumed that she has been expecting Kara. She has a brief exchange with the nurse of which Kara registers little and then turns to her, looking down on her by virtue of being much taller than Kara.

“You’re Ms. Luthor’s health care agent?” she asks.

“Yes, yes, I am,” Kara replies, feeling herself shrinking down, “how is she doing? How bad is it?”

The doctor, Dr Jones if the embroidery, followed by M.D. and accompanied by the hospital logo on the other side of her chest, is any indication, gives Kara a sympathetic look and puts the chart, presumably Lena’s, down.

“You have to understand that Ms. Luthor was involved in a serious accident. She’s sustained a lot of injuries. She is stable for now—”

“What injuries?” Kara cuts her off. Kara hates cutting people off. The doctor nods in understanding.

“She had a collapsed lung which we were able to successfully treat and she should be able to breathe independently soon. Her CT scan showed what we call a temporal epidural hematoma, which means there was bleeding between the skull and the brain,”

“Oh god,” Kara mutters under her breath as the doctor continues, _going once._

“She did receive treatment soon after the injury and outcomes are better for patients who receive treatment earlier on but when it comes to EDH, there is always a risk of permanent brain injury, the severity of which varies. We can’t know for sure before she wakes up–”

“But she is going to wake up?” Kara asks, though it’s more of a prayer in dialogue.

“We’re optimistic at the time but we don’t know for sure. Only time can tell,” the doctor replies, leaving a beat of silence for Kara to process the news before continuing, “Beyond that, her bowel ruptured and she’s fractured several bones, including her leg. She’s lost a lot of blood. During surgery, she went into cardiac arrest **—** ”

“Oh god.” _Going twice._ The floor Kara is standing on is being lifted away, tile-by-tile. She grabs onto an empty tray for support.

“We were able to resuscitate and stop the bleeding. She is stable for now but she will be needing further surgery tending to the fractures,” a pause, “and we’re worried about her leg.”

“Worried about it?” Kara asked, her brow furrowing. That was far too gentle a phrasing to be anything good.

“It was partially dismembered in the accident and there are signs of major infection. Right now, we are looking into reconstructive surgery and waiting for the infection to improve but there is a very real possibility that we will have to amputate.”

“Oh god.” _Sold._

“Now, in that case we will need your consent to perform the procedure.”

“And what if you don’t?”  
  


“We can’t know for certain and, like I said, we are still looking at potential reconstruction currently but if it comes to that, it would be a matter of life or death.”

_Deep breaths._ Kara gathers herself and stands upright despite the room spinning around her. The word _dismembered_ is echoing in her mind.

“When can I see her?” she asks.  
  


“Ms. Luthor is just out of surgery. It’s hospital policy that patients are not cleared for visitation until an hour after surgery to allow the PACU nurses to focus on providing the best care to the patient. I assure you, she is in good hands and a nurse will let you know as soon as she’s cleared for visitation, as soon as they’ve determined that a visit is safe. In the meantime, we ask you to remain in the family waiting area. Unless you have any further questions–”

Kara doesn’t even let her finish that sentence, just waves the doctor away with a dismissive hand gesture and a defeated nod. She knows she should be thankful to the person that, in all likelihood, just brought Lena back from the dead, and _by Rao_ , she will be if she makes it through the day but at the moment, she’s too overwhelmed to show gratitude or anything other than worry.

The nurse stays with her for another moment just to explain that visitation in the PACU is only allowed for a minuscule five minutes and she must have a PACU staff member accompanying her, packed with empty platitudes before and after each sentence. Kara doesn’t respond, just follows him wordlessly to the Family Lounge and sits down on a dusty old couch with a thud and _waits._

She glares at the clock on the wall and only stops at the fear she might set fire to it by accident. The ticking is almost as unbearably loud as it is unbearably slow. It’s like the damned thing is mocking her, each metronomic beat a reminder of her own heart beating in her throat, so damnably human is her heart right now. An hour passes torturously, a nurse, different one this time, comes in to escort her to the PACU.

“Is she awake?” Kara asks.

“No, not yet.”

“When will she,” Kara begins and stops, correcting herself, “I mean, how long will it take for the anaesthesia to wear off?”

Sometimes it’s better to ask the questions you can get clear answers to instead of the ones you really want to ask.

“Couple of hours, generally no more than three.”

Kara nods. The rest of the walk is silent. It takes less than a minute. The room they enter is chock full of people and all the beeping machines attached to them create a cacophony that’d give Kara a tension headache on the best of days. The nurse leads her to Lena, lying in her hospital bed.

The curtain to her left has been drawn to expose a vacant bed by the window. There are streaks on sunlight cascading onto her pale skin through the blinds. She’s not looking good. There’s a tube down her throat, permanently parting her lips that look bluer than usual. Her head is wrapped in gauze like a last-minute low-budget Halloween costume, tied together by the cast enveloping most of her right arm up to her wrist and the bandages packed with gauze on her forehead hiding stiches. There’s no blood anymore, everything is very clean, very clinical, only a bit of bruising has been left uncovered as well as some redness underneath a cut on her cheek landmarked with surgical tape. Her hands are resting on top of the thin white blanket covering her, the left one connected to an IV drip.

Kara chokes back a gasp and, without her realising, a painful lump forms at the back of her throat. With hesitance in her fingers, she lowers her glasses just enough to take a quick look. Lena is _not_ looking good.

There’s a tube in her chest connected to a large machine and a tube in her head connected to a different, larger machine and the largest machine of all leads to a series of electrodes attached to her chest, upper arms and legs. Kara glances at the leg the doctor mentioned. The bones in it are shattered, only vaguely held in place by a splint. Her arm has a clear split, the same can be said about her collarbone and multiple ribs, though her wrist is more of a mess.

Kara puts her glasses back on. She can’t bear to look anymore. Ignoring the beeping machines surrounding her and all the tubes and bandages, Lena looks as though she is sleeping rather peacefully. Kara tucks a loose strand of dark hair behind her ear.

“Can she hear me?” she asks the nurse.

She gets a well-intentioned shrug and a, “Couldn’t hurt to try,” in response.

“Is it,” she swallows, hard. Lena looks so fragile, there are so many lines connected to her like all the roads winding up in Rome, it looks like she’s barely being held together by all these tubes and gauze and Kara feels like an elephant in a jewellery shop, afraid one wrong move is going to bring everything crumbling down with a terrible shatter. She bites back a tear and tries again.

“Can I hold her hand, is that okay?” she asks, her eyes laser focused on the IV cannula just underneath Lena’s knuckles.

“Yes, that’s fine,” the nurse replies, “though, it doesn’t hurt to be careful.”

Kara looks at her like she’s just saved her from drowning. She takes Lena’s hand and brushes her thumb over it. It’s cold but in a familiar way. Lena’s hands are always cold, just as Kara’s are always warm.

“Hi,” she says with a weak smile. “I’m here, Lena. I’m right here. Come back to me, okay?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi if you leave a comment i will personally love you and remain forever grateful, you totally don't have to but lack of feedback Will send me to ultra mega super turbo hell for homos so yk, think abt that, maybe? thanks for reading, updates will be daily for a little while until they won't be anymore bc i'm like that, ok, luv ya


	2. Top Ten Ways for Lena Luthor to Die

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you to the wonderful sabulum-p for beta reading!!

When Lena wakes up, the pain is gone. Most of it, anyway. She’s just sore and _heavy_. Every part of her body feels like someone poured cement into it while she was sleeping and it’s slowly been hardening since. She can’t move.

The first thing she notices beside the heaviness is that her leg feels _wrong_. Not painful, not entirely numb but something is definitely wrong, she feels it with a dreadful certainty.

Her eyelids feel platinum plated, so strenuous to flutter open. The steady signature beeping of her ECG machine and the low hiss of the ventilator form the overture to her new chance at life. The room around her is terribly bright.

The first thing she sees is wrinkled cornflower blue fabric. The second thing she sees are piercing blue eyes– a deeper blue than her gown, and more vibrant, the way teary eyes always are –hovering over her. Kara’s been chewing on her bottom lip and her forehead is scrunched up like discarded laundry. Her hair is all dishevelled and half of her nails have been chewed down to nubs and it’s not a good look on her but her eyes look beautiful, even bloodshot and red-rimmed.

It’s good to see her. Lena wouldn’t say it even if she could but it is. She’s not entirely sure why, being completely honest, she’s not exactly sure where she is or why, everything is fuzzy and heavy, but the sight of Kara makes her feel warm. Safe.

“Lena,” Kara breathes as though someone had just lifted a boulder off her chest and ghosts her fingers over Lena’s cheek.

She wants to part her lips to speak but they’re already parted by a tube going down her throat. She has a hunch that if something wasn’t noticeably numbing sensation in her body, the tube would be a rather unpleasant experience. Her lips are dry and chapped, she’s parched. She decides to try to speak despite the tube. An incomprehensive noise comes out, more gurgle than words. A nurse enters her field of vision.

“Please don’t attempt to speak while the breathing tube is in,” she says, “We’ll remove it as soon as you’re able to breathe on your own. Please try to calm down, I know you must be confused. You’re at the hospital. You were in an accident. Your friend is here to see you.”

Well, that clears up little to nothing. But Lena does try her best to calm down. Her eyes have gone wide despite herself, the panic of being paralysed in an unfamiliar setting is sinking in. She has so many questions and no way to ask them. The machines are so loud, it’s overwhelming. She can’t concentrate on what the nurse is saying despite being desperate to learn more.

The only thing that she can focus on is Kara. Kara looking at her with her perfect blue eyes, wells of concern. Kara calling her name. Kara saying, “I’m here,” and, “It’s okay,” over and over again and Lena knows she only means one of those. Kara’s terrible at keeping things from her.

But Kara is the only thing making her feel safe here so she reaches out her hand, straining her muscles just to hover it above the bed and spread her fingers. At first, Kara seems confused but she catches on and takes Lena’s hand and squeezes it, careful not to put any pressure on the IV cannula just below her knuckles. She does her best to keep from crying because who does that help? A tear slips past anyway.

“Just breathe, Lena,” she tells her, “I’m right here. And I’m not going anywhere.”

She doesn’t thrash, though she would like to. She is too weak to, she has been forbidden to, and Kara is squeezing her hand, pulling her back down to Earth. She just breathes.

Despite the heaviness and the confusion and the pain she’s in beginning to register, Lena feels safe enough to settle down. The beeping coming from the ECG monitor blends into the background.

She doesn’t try to speak but she looks for Kara’s eyes and catches them and holds her gaze fiercely. She looks at Kara with fear and despite herself, Kara reflects the fear back. Kara is a good liar, much better than she’d like to admit, but her eyes aren’t.

Lena tries to communicate the questions tormenting her to Kara with her gaze, hoping, praying Kara will understand what she’s trying to say. She focuses so hard she gives herself a headache and she’s tired again. Sleep has already found its way to the corners of her vision; it’s tempting her away. Lena wants to stay.

She can’t remember how long she’s spent in the dark but it feels like much too long and Kara is here so she does her best to stay but her body works despite herself. She feels herself slipping, she feels Kara’s repeated reassurances growing quieter and quieter until the words stop making sense and it’s just her voice guiding her back into the dark, her eyes falling shut, grown weary of the bright sunlight. Then, nothing.

She fades in and out of consciousness but everything is just one big blur where she can’t tell if she’s awake or dreaming. Her world has turned into a Picasso and even that’s not quite right. The monochromatic blues of 1901 to 1904 and the fragmentation of his analytic cubism period swirl together like soft serve ice cream. Lena never did care for Picasso. _Too misogynistic._

***

When she peels her eyes open for good, the room has changed. There’s a window to her right instead of her left and the blinds are drawn; even then, she can tell it’s dark outside. There are no other beds in this room and by virtue of that, it’s much quieter. She looks around. Though her body is still heavy and half her limbs won’t budge despite her best efforts, she can lift her head from the hard pillow and crane her neck forwards which gives her a slightly larger field of vision.

The ventilator is still humming and her lips are even drier. Kara is sat in a chair by her bed, her hands gone limp around Lena’s. Her chest rises and falls slowly like Lena’s, her eyes have fallen shut and she has rested her head on the side of the bed, an inch from Lena’s torso. Lena doesn’t want to wake her even if she could, she looks so _darling_ when she sleeps.

Instead, she assesses the damage the way any scientist worth their weight in salt would. She’s long derived from context that she’s been involved in a severe accident but she can’t remember being in any recently. Her body clearly does but the brain is stubborn and, _oh_ , this would go much easier if she wasn’t Lena Kieran Luthor, serial cockroach.

In her mind’s eye, she retraces her steps. The last thing she remembers is slamming a door in Kara’s face and storming off. What came after that is a fog. She strains her memory, enough to give herself another headache despite the ridiculous amount of painkillers circulating her system.

Could’ve been a plane crash. Wouldn’t be her first. Or perhaps someone threw her off a building, there’s a second time for everything, right? Speaking of second chances, it’s entirely possible she disobeyed her best instincts and got in another chopper after what happened with the last one. Well, it couldn’t have been a poisoning because her arm has a cast on it, maybe someone hit her with a car.

Oh.

_Car keys._

Of course. She slammed the door and stormed off and gotten in her car and _drove_. Eating the white lines on the highway alive, she put the pedal to the floor and listened to the engine roar, the radio blasting some early 90s grunge-love-suicide blues. This scene ends in a fog, she has no memory of it happening but context clues give it away. These scenes always end with someone bleeding out by the side of the road and someone else dead at the steering wheel.

She’d laugh if she could.

After everything she’s survived with barely a bruise, all the failed assassination attempts, all the little fires around the lab that culminated in a blister or two, she, Lena Luthor, has ended up glued to a hospital bed by a car accident. It’s cosmic irony. It makes for great comedy and _she can’t even laugh at it._

God, she’d been so mad at Kara. She wants to be mad with her still, she has every right to be and every part of her upbringing is yelling at her to preserve the little dignity she has left but, oh, could it hurt to just leave it for the night? It’s not like she can speak anyway and Kara’s hands are so warm, her skin so soft, her little wheeze as she sleeps so _damnably_ lovable.

And Lena really doesn’t want to be left alone like this. She really, really doesn’t and all the dignity in the world won’t shield her from the knowledge that no one else will show up to hold her hand and sleep by her bed.

She can tell she’s been asleep for a while which is why it’s confusing how she can still be so tired. She doesn’t want to go back to sleep. She _wants_ to sit up, rip the tape off of her cheeks, pull the tube out of her throat, free herself of all the drips and catheters and electrodes, crack her knuckles, stretch her legs and stand up. She wants to walk away and go home. Have a drink, sleep it off. Start anew tomorrow. Forget it ever happened at all. But she can’t do any of that. She can barely lift her head.

Both her legs are far too heavy to lift but she can just about wiggle the toes on the left. Her right hand seems fine at a glance but Kara’s hands around it are like a sleeping cat she doesn’t have the heart to wake. She tries to lift her left arm and though she can’t bend it at the elbow, it comes off the bed and Lena winces in pain. Her collarbone is giving her grief so she lets it fall back in defeat and sighs. _How is it even possible to be this tired?_

Her head is pounding and it feels like the worst hangover of her life which is certainly saying something considering her semi-legendary affinity for a good scotch. She rests her head back on the pillow and rolls it to the side to watch Kara sleep. There are a few blonde curls that’ve fallen on her face that make her nose scrunch up every now and then. She really has no right to look this adorable. With that thought on her mind, Lena lets go. The darkness consumes her headfirst and she doesn’t wake up until the room has changed, the windows have lit up and her hands have returned to cold for the absence of Kara’s.

***

This room is a little bigger and more furnished. Someone has drawn the blinds. Someone has covered the windowsill with vases full of flowers, and the bedside counter and cabinet in the corner of the room. The smell is _pungent_. It’s actually giving her a headache.

She looks around to find herself alone. The door opens. It’s Kara, carrying more flowers. God knows where she intends on putting them. Seeing Lena awake, she near-drops the pots, catching them in the air before they have time to land with a shatter. She smiles, sheepish, puts the flowers down right there on the floor and makes her way to Lena.

“You’re awake,” she says.

If she could, Lena would reply with, “Thanks, Kara. Please continue to point out the obvious,” and her voice would have an edge to it that’s just a little too sharp because by God, if there’s one thing Lena hates, it’s vulnerability and after everything Kara said, her guard is up.

“I brought you flowers,” Kara says as though hearing Lena’s suggestion but losing the irony in translation. “How are you feeling?”

Lena’s not sure if Kara expects her to reply. She lifts her immaculately manicured eyebrows, a gesture that hurts much more than she thought it would, and gives Kara a thumbs-down.

Kara gives her a half-smile in response as if to say, “Fair.” And sits by her bed. She looks at Lena like she’s the most precious thing in the world and Lena can’t stand that look. It always barges in, tearing feelings out of the little boxes in her head with no regard for the mess it leaves behind.

Kara sighs. She ghosts her the back of her hand over Lena’s cheek and brushes up against a healing scar. Lena winces despite herself.

“Sorry,” Kara says and looks like she has more to say, more to apologise for but the door opens and closes again, enter a nurse.

“Lena, is it?” she asks, not looking up from the chart in her hands.

Again, Lena’s not sure if or how she’s expected to respond. She gives a little nod.

“I see you’re awake. That’s good. So,” she says, taking an assertive step into the room, “I’ve just talked to your team, your oxygen levels are looking good, airway’s clear, you’ve been breathing nicely by yourself on minimal ventilator settings for about an hour now. What do you say, ready to get that tube out?”

Lena nods like a child that’s been asked if she’d like an ice cream sundae and a puppy. That earns a smile from the nurse.   
  


“Let me just get a few things ready here,” she says. Kara takes a few steps away from Lena to give her space.

She puts a sheet on Lena’s chest and listens to hear breathing. Kara fiddles with her glasses in the corner with the cabinet. The nurse suctions Lena’s mouth dry and the whole time Lena is looking at Kara standing in the corner, awkward like a scolded puppy, and fighting the urge to chuckle. It’s a great distraction from the horrible gagging sensation in her throat. The nurse cuts through the tape on Lena’s cheeks, removes the breathing machine and says, “Now I want you to take some deep breaths in, okay?”

Lena nods and pulls as much air into her lungs as she can muster.

“One more.”

She does and half-way through begins to retch. Not her finest moment. She feels like she’s going to cough her lungs out but the fit passes and once she settles back down on the bed, despite the soreness in her throat, she feels relieved. The nurse replaces the ET tube with an NC which might as well be Kara’s university sweater because of how comfortable it feels in comparison.

  
The nurse fiddles with her IVs and writes something on the board in her room before leaving. As soon as she does, Kara is back at Lena’s bedside and takes her hand.

“Are you okay? That looked uncomfortable.”

Lena’s voice is hushed and raspy like a sick crow. She just says, “Water.”

Kara blinks. “Of course.” Another blink, another awkward half-smile and then she stands up, letting go of Lena’s hand. “I’ll go get some now,” she says and swallows and spins on her heel.

She gets back quickly, holding a plastic cup with a little tremor in her hand.

“Here,” she says and hands the cup to Lena who tries to take it but her fingers won’t fully close around it and her hand is admittedly shaking worse than Kara’s. Though her grip’s insecure, she tries to lift it to her lips but only gets half-way. She grits her teeth.

“Can you,” she croaks and leaves the sentence unfinished. How she hates asking for help.

“Oh, of course,” Kara replies just as sheepishly, tilting the cup to Lena’s dry lips so she can take a sip all the while Lena avoids her gaze, as though not making eye-contact will save her some embarrassment. She gulps the water down as though she’s found an oasis after months in the desert.

“Thanks,” she says when the cup’s empty. Kara doesn’t reply, just looks at her. They sit in silence for a minute. Kara fiddles with her glasses.

“I’m glad you’re okay,” she says under her breath.

_Am I?_ Lena wants to ask. Instead she nods.

“I was so worried. I thought I was going to lose you,” Kara admits. “You were,” she begins to say and chokes on her words, “You were…” _dead_. But she can’t say that because the tears have already started falling and if she says it, she fears they’ll never stop. She wipes them away with the cuff of her sleeve. The white polka-dotted fabric hasn’t even had time to fully dry yet.

“Did I,” Lena says, pausing, humming, trying to figure out what she was trying to say, “did I get a haircut?” It’s the only fully coherent thing in her mind as she can’t stop thinking about how the large bandages on her head feel awfully close to her skin where she distinctly remembers hair being before waking up here.

The question is unexpected enough to stop Kara’s tears.

“Yeah,” she mumbles, “yeah, uh, I’m sorry, you, uh,” she breathes a chuckle as she finds herself dumbstruck.

“Huh,” Lena replies. Come to think of it, there might be some morphine still lingering in her system. She looks into Kara’s red-rimmed baby blue eyes.

Kara’s hoping Lena doesn’t remember where they left things off, Lena can tell. Lena remembers. Just for now, she pretends not to.

“I’m glad you’re here,” she says, her voice still barely above a whisper. That earns a smile from Kara.

“Always.”

They sit in silence for a while. It’s nice. Lena finds herself transfixed by the way the setting sun bounces off of Kara’s golden curls. She grows weary again but forces herself to stay awake. Every now and then, Kara looks away and Lena spots her wiping away a stray tear. She knows what she’s doing. Kara’s trying to stay strong for her. She’s making an admirable effort but now and again, a tear or sigh slips through and it’s just about the most agonising thing to witness. She’s looking at Lena like she’ll never let her go again, like she’d latch onto her even as she’s being dragged into hell and pull her back. It’s an addictive way to be looked at.

Lena looks at her hand sitting inches away from Kara’s. It’s much whiter and much colder. The more she looks at it— though she’s having some trouble concentrating so the thought keeps slipping from her, she wants to say something but keeps forgetting, the more she looks at her cold, clammy hand next to Kara’s which is pink and soft, the more she realises she’s cold all over. It’s sending chills down her spine. She wants to ask for an extra blanket but— what was it she wanted to ask for again? She was going to say something. What was it, if only she wasn’t so cold, she could focus on remembering what she needed to say. Her nailbeds are turning blue, she wants to ask Kara to hold her hand to warm it up but forgets. She feels the need to lie down, though she already is, it’s just that her head is pounding and she’s starting to get dizzy. The room is swaying side to side like a cabin on a ship. One of those horribly stormy nights that make you sink all ten of your nails into the sides of your bunk if only to gain some illusion of stability, enough to get to sleep without feeling like this is it. Maybe this is it for her. Certainly feels like it.

The dread welling up at the pit of her stomach can only be described as the Titanic heading for the iceberg. There is a poem that describes it well by Laura Lamb Brown-Lavoie, if only she could remember what it said. She’s too cold to think.

Kara stares at Lena staring off into space, wondering if she’s imagining her lips turning blue.

Lena’s shivering. Her breathing’s accelerating by the minute. Her heart is pounding in her head, she’s just so cold, she has to say something. _Anything_. _Now_.

“I don’t feel so good.”

“I know.” Kara gives her a sympathetic look. “I know.”

“No,” Lena breathes. She needs to explain that she’s not just feeling bad because she’s been in an accident, she needs to communicate that something is _very_ wrong with her. Something in the pit of her stomach is telling her this is the end. The dread is overwhelming her and she needs to say something before she sails right into the iceberg. All that comes out is, “I’m so,” punctuated by a wheeze, “cold.”

Kara’s brow furrows as Lena’s chin falls on her chest, her eyes slipping half-way shut. She touches her hand to Lena’s forehead. It’s like an oven. She’s burning up.

Lena’s breathing is laboured, her vision’s fading, she’s clawing for something, she’s not sure what. Kara punches the red call light multiple times and flings herself out of the chair, running out to find a nurse, a doctor, anyone. In an instant, Lena is surrounded by people on all sides. Everyone’s yelling and it’s hurting her head.

“Where’s Kara?” she asks a doctor who doesn’t reply.

“Temp’s 104, serum lactate is 6,” she says instead. “She’s going into septic shock.” She turns to the nurse that Lena saw before. “Do you have her on pressors?”

“Pressors, triple antibiotics, aggressive IV fluids,” he lists with a shrug.

“Okay, start her on Hydrocortisone and intubate,” she says without missing a beat.

_I just got that thing out_ , Lena thinks as the ET tube snakes its way back into her throat.

“Vitals are still deteriorating, she’s crashing.”

Like synchronised swimmers, all three of them think the same thing at the same exact time but only Lena’s doctor says it out loud:

“It’s the leg.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi thanks for reading, everyone's comments on the last chapter were so lovely, i really appreciate everyone who takes the time to leave them!! (even if i don't always reply,, it's the executive dysfunction for me but i try) hope you enjoyed chapter 2, chapter 3 coming tomorrow <3


	3. One More Time with Feeling

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you to sabulum-p for beta reading!

Kara is gnawing on her bottom lip. There’s barely anything left to gnaw on. Her phone rings. It’s Alex.

She stares at the name on her phone screen for a while, her eyes glassed over. On the fourth ring, she picks up. The voice on the other end of the line is brimming with concern and anxiety but she remains detached.

“Kara! Where have you been?”

Kara taps her fingers on the plastic of her chair and hums, not saying anything.

“I’ve called you a thousand times, we’ve been looking for you everywhere,” Alex continues in response to the silence.

“I had my phone on silent,” Kara says, adding a murmured, “sorry,” that she doesn’t really mean.

“We needed you back there, where the hell have you been?” Alex asks, growing almost accusatory, then mellowing out to add, “Are you okay?”

“I’m,” Kara begins, doesn’t know how to finish. “It’s Lena.”

“What? What’d she do?”

“She didn’t do anything, Alex. She was– _I’ve_ been at the hospital. With her. Lena’s at the hospital.” Kara sighs, running her fingers through her greasy hair, fighting the urge to rip it out in clumps. She stands up from her cold chair like a switchblade being opened and starts pacing.

She breathes a laugh but it’s not a nice sound. It’s an angry laugh, the kind of cosmic anger that bubbles underneath your skin. Makes you want to scream and cry and kick down tables. To fist-fight God. Makes you unable to do any of that and once you’ve exhausted all options, all that comes out is pesky exasperated laughter.

“You know, I would really appreciate if you could get off my back right now,” she says, so passive-aggressive she sounds unlike herself, “because, I’m sorry, I just gave someone,” she chuckles with a lost, manic look in her eyes, “permission to _cut off_ my best friend’s _leg_!” It comes out louder than she expected it to but she’s not in the business of apologising today. “So, if you don’t mind, I’ll be taking the day off!”

There’s an awkward silence.

“I’m sorry,” Alex says. “What happened?”

Kara just sighs and sits back down, defeated.

“Do you need me there? Kara, I can be right there, just tell me which hospital you’re at, I’ll be on my way,” Alex adds to break the silence, making it impossible to stay mad at her, no matter how much Kara would like to be mad at _anyone_ right now. She fiddles with her glasses.

“National City General,” she says, considering adding something but giving up. There’s nothing more to say.

“I’ll be right there.”

“Thanks,” Kara says, tight-lipped, before hanging up.

She puts her phone face-down on the blue plastic and stares up at the ceiling. So, this is the point where she runs every deity she can think of through her head and tries her best to pray just in case. The ceiling fan flaps in-sync with the metronome of Kara’s heart, always too human.

She curses herself out for the hundredth time for not noticing earlier; she should’ve called a nurse as soon as she saw those blueing lips, sooner even. She should’ve been there to prevent the whole thing in the first place, shouldn’t have said what she said, shouldn’t have done what she did, and where do we go from here? Life is an hourglass glued to the table, there’s no turning back time now. All there is to do is _wait_.

So, she waits. Again.

In the silence between the fan whirring, the gravity of her words sets in.

_No family, just me._

She looks around, at the empty chairs next to hers. She’s not alone in the waiting room but she’s alone in the waiting.

Most people wouldn’t touch a Luthor with a 10-foot pole, right? And Lena is the last of them. Everyone but Lillian is dead, and she’s serving multiple life sentences, not exactly the kind of inmate that’d be considered for furlough. Not exactly the kind of mother that’d apply for it.

Unwillingly, Kara’s mind wanders back to her last conversation with Lena before the accident.

It’s funny, the way we recall conversations we regret. It’s always our own words we wish we could take back that get bolded and highlighted. Everything else fades into the background and we’re left wondering why we’d ever say something like that at all.

It _was_ something Lena said that’d made her angry, furious even. So much so that she’d wanted to say something hurtful in response, not because it was true but because human hearts come with complications, the soft animals of our bodies get angry when they’re hurting and say things they don’t really mean. It’s hard-wired into the way human hearts love which is never clean nor polished. It cannot be sanitised. It’s messy, it’s painful, it’s entrails all over your perfect fucking American lawn.

Her words echo back to her like a chorus of demons tormenting her from above. She’s beneath even them.

_“You sound just like your brother.”_

Had she, really? Does it even matter anymore?

_“You know_ ** _—_** _”_ She should’ve stopped there, she should’ve stopped before the argument even took place. But she didn’t. She said, _“Sometimes I wish I’d never met you. All we ever seem to do is hurt each other.”_

It was one of those heat of the moment things you yell out just to see how bad it’ll make you feel; she wasn’t expecting Lena to storm off. She regretted it as soon as she’d said it. When that door slammed in her face, she went after her. But Lena got in her car and drove off. Kara thought she just needed some space. She didn’t follow. She’d sleep it off, apologise tomorrow. There was always _tomorrow_.

What _the hell_ happened to tomorrow?

Tomorrow turned into midnight, tomorrow turned into three days later, still suspended in limbo.

When the minutes turn to hours, there’s a lot of time to think back. Too much. _60%_ , they told her after wheeling Lena away, a 60% chance she’d make it. Cold, hard math. After all this time, after all the much worse odds they’ve defied together, it can’t come down to this. She keeps going back to those words, she can’t help it. If she’d never met Lena.

She filters through the scenarios in her mind, recalling everything they’ve survived together and the more she thinks about it, the more the answer seems apparent. If she’d never met Lena, there’s a good chance they’d both be long dead.

How many times has she saved Lena from certain death? How many times has Lena saved her? For her to not be there this time ** _—_** how many times? She’ll drive herself insane with these questions if she keeps going, if only she knew how to stop. She’d gladly go up in flames with the madness if only it would do a thing to help. It won’t. She knows it won’t because she’s already tried so she tries to focus on the ceiling fan and then the cold blue plastic masquerading as a chair then the fan again. Eventually, she gives up and simply closes her eyes. She cradles her head in her hands and rocks back and forth.

She opens her eyes when a pair of arms envelop her but doesn’t look up. She knows it’s Alex. She just sobs into the embrace and allows herself to be held. At the end of the day, that’s all she can do.

“You’re okay,” Alex says. It’s a lie but a nice one. She refrains from shushing Kara; it’d be a terrible idea to keep these tears inside. They’d eat her up like worms to apples, make her rot inside out, a slow decomposition. She just lets her cry for as long as she needs to.

There comes a point where Kara has tired herself out. The tears stop. She breathes in sighs and sits, staring at the floor, defeated.

“She’ll be okay,” Alex whispers. Kara looks up.

“What if she won’t?” she says, barely audible. Her eyes are puffy and red; she sniffles.

Alex doesn’t say anything. These are the conversations where there are no right things to say.

“What if she **—** ” Kara repeats, her voice getting stuck at the back of her throat. She blinks away the tears that have welled up again and takes a deep breath.

“Don’t think about that,” Alex replies, easier said than done, “I’ve got you, okay? Just breathe.”

Kara dries her tearstained cheeks with the cuff of her sleeve, nods and does her best to breathe. _Easier said than done_. The automatic doors open and close, a doctor walks in. Kara follows him with her eyes fading in hope by the second as he seems to be coming towards her, turns away and walks up to someone else instead. This is the third time that’s happened.

The first two thanked the doctor profusely, practically leaping with joy. The third one left weeping. So, what’ll it be? The worst part is not knowing.

_Finally_ , a familiar face in familiar scrubs. Kara meets the doctor half-way. “How is she? Please tell me she’s okay.”

“She is stable.”

Kara breathes a sigh of relief, clutching her chest.

“Her vitals are improving; we’re expecting her to wake up soon. It’d be good if you were there when she wakes up, it’ll help relieve the anxiety.”

“So, she—” Kara coughs uncomfortably. She knows the answer to her question pre-emptively, it just doesn’t feel real.

“The procedure was successful. We eliminated the source of infection and her prognosis is good. Recovery will take some time but considering her injuries, she’s doing very well.”

“That’s good, right?” Alex chimes in.

“Yeah.” Kara nods. Except it’s not all good. She’s glad beyond measure that Lena’s okay but leaping for joy won’t be on the itinerary for a long time, she fears.

“I can take you to her now,” the doctor offers. Kara nods gratefully and follows, Alex holding an arm around her that might be the only thing keeping her up as they walk.   
  
Kara sniffles.

“Are you okay?” Alex asks. “This is good news.”

“I know,” Kara sighs with a sad smile. “But I’m not looking forward to telling her.”

“Telling her what?”  
  


“ _I_ gave them the go. She was out before she could consent to anything. It was me.”

“Kara, you saved her life.”  
  


“I know! I know. But I’m the reason she’s waking up without a leg. And I’m not looking forward to telling her that.”

They reach the PACU at which point the doctor turns to Alex and says, “I’m sorry, PACU is family-only. You can visit once the patient’s released to an inpatient ward. It shouldn’t take long.”

Alex gives Kara a look as she follows the surgeon through the automatic glass doors. Already on the other side, Kara responds with a little shrug.

Lena’s looking well. About as well as can be expected. The colour’s returned to her cheeks, her lips are no longer blue. She’s up, though hazy from the medication.

“Kara!”

Kara smiles, assuming her position by Lena’s bedside.

“Do you know,” Lena begins, lifting her good arm off the bed by a few inches so she can touch Kara’s arm, though her fingers don’t fully close around it, “how _glad_ I am to wake up without a tube down my throat?”

Kara gives her a smile.

“Do you?” Lena asks, motioning with her head.

“Yeah,” Kara breathes a gentle laugh.

“Big fan.” Her voice is almost completely gone but a ghost of a smile is dancing on her lips.

“How are you feeling?” Kara asks.  
  
Lena takes a deep breath. “Fine.”

Kara breathes a sigh of relief. Lena, to the sabotage of her relief, continues with, “What happened?”

“You don’t remember?”

“No,” Lena replies, “but the way you said that makes me think it was bad.”

“It was,” Kara admits.

An uncomfortable silence takes hold, between the beeping and the ventilators hissing, it’s incredible how quickly silence can choke you out. Lena smiles, an utmost uncomfortable gesture.

“Tell me. What happened?” The agitation in her eyes grows.

“There was a complication.”

“What complication?”

“The infection. In your leg, it got really bad, really fast. You were,” Kara pauses there. She always pauses there. She can’t bring herself to say it.

“I was what?”

Lena’s met with yet another stubborn silence.

“Tell me!” she demands.

It breaks Kara to say it. She has to close her eyes; she can’t face Lena. If she did, she’d start crying and she is already all cried out, she is fucking _dehydrated_.

“You were going to die!” she cries and opens her eyes, blinking away the tears welling up in them. “So, I told them to do what they had to do.”

“What do you mean?”

“The leg.”

“No.” As if to say, _You’re joking._

“It was going to kill you,” Kara pleads.

“No.” It’s a calm, cold and calculated statement. An objection.

“I had to,” Kara breathes, her voice breaking, “they had to-”

“You didn’t.”

“I did. They did. It’s gone, Lena.”

Lena’s brow furrows, her eyes fall shut. She gulps in air and blows it out. Her hand drops down to her bed. Kara misses her touch as soon as it’s gone.

“We were going to lose you,” Kara tries to explain, “and you’re alive! You’re alive and I’m so glad-”

“I think you need to leave,” Lena breathes, “for _a while_. Before I say something terrible.”

“No, I’m, I’m here for you, okay?”

“Just go,” Lena says, not raising her voice but her tone growing so strict it’s impossible to disobey as she waves Kara away. “Go!”

Kara, on the verge of tears, turns around. She looks back just once. “I’ll be back, okay?”

“Okay.”

***

The lion’s share of time in hospitals is spent on waiting, which highlights just how long the wait for Kara’s return feels after Lena’s gotten over her first instinctual bout of utter rage. There’s a very distinct self-loathing in needing someone this way. Depowered and vulnerable and angry and still, solitude seems a curse worse than death. Solitude— solitude, but for the absence of one person– just how awful is that, needing someone?

It’s not a long wait from a chronological viewpoint but then, the chronological has always fell inferior to the emotional. The perception of time is intrinsically tied to our connection to other people.

Lena got her old room back after spending an hour in the PACU and another 12 in the ICU where she spent most of her time asleep as it was the dead of the night. The nurse told her she got lucky. The flowers still gave her a headache.

It’s just past noon when Kara peeks her head in through the door. Lena’s just finished moving in, or rather, being moved in.

“How are you?” Kara asks.

“Fine. And you?” Lena looks, at once, powerful and fragile. Hospital gowns make someone look even smaller than they are and she’s just had her staples removed, revealing a gnarly, curved scar trailing from her forehead to her ear. Almost half her head is shaved and she’s propped up only by two pillows but her presence commands respect.

“I’m just happy you’re okay.”

Again, Lena wants to ask _Am I?_

Instead, she says, “As am I.”

“There’s people here to see you.” Kara gestures towards the door with her head. “Alex and James and-” Lena shakes her head and cuts her off.

“Tell them it’s very nice of them to come but I’d rather not take any visitors today. I’m very tired.”

“Oh.” Kara bites her lip and stares at her feet. “Do you want me to go, too?”

Lena takes a look around the room, the flowers decorating the plain furniture, the bundle of balloons that one has come loose from and the chair Kara was sleeping in a few nights ago that looks even more uncomfortable in the daylight.

“To me, it seems you’re as much a visitor here as I am. No. You can stay.” Lena almost follows it with, ‘I would like you to stay,” but bites her tongue just in time to catch it before it slips out.

Relief washes over Kara’s face.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

Lena hums in response. “I suppose I am glad I’m not dead.”

Kara responds with a soft smile. “So am I.”

Lena takes a moment to consider her next words, as though evaluating how they’ll taste rolling off her tongue and just how much of herself she is willing to display.

“I haven’t,” she swallows, “haven’t seen it yet.”

“No?”

Lena shakes her head and breathes a sad laugh. “Feels like it’s still there.”

“Does it?”

Lena nods, avoiding eye contact. “I think I would like to see it. But I,” she sighs, the words are too bitter to come out. Swallowing her inhibition, she says, “I don’t want to look alone.”

“Of course,” Kara gives her a gentle smile, “I’m right here.”

“Can you—” Lena swallows, “could you lift the blanket?”

“Of course,” Kara says, melding it into one word in her mouth, and takes the edge of Lena’s thin blanket, peeling it back slowly to reveal more of a gown in the same shade. Just as she’s about to get to the cast, Lena puts her hand on Kara’s arm.

“I need a moment,” she says.

“Of course,” Kara repeats herself, “take as long as you need.”

Lena takes a deep breath.

“Okay. Okay.”

As Kara begins to peel back the blanket again, Lena cries out.

“No! Wait, I’m sorry, can you just,” she trails off, closing her eyes. When she speaks again, she sounds small. “Can you hold my hand, please?”

Without a moment’s hesitation, Kara takes her hand, giving it a gentle squeeze. Lena gives her a nod. Kara continues peeling the blanket back.

“Just do it. Just get it over with. Like a band-aid.”

Kara pulls the covers off Lena’s leg, or rather what’s left of it. That is to say, everything up to the knee and a stump, wrapped up in a big purple cast.

“Oh god,” Lena says.

“Are you okay?” Kara asks.

Lena doesn’t know how to answer.

“It looks good, right? Looks like it’s healing well and you don’t have the infection anymore and-”

“Kara, half my leg is _gone_.”

Lena looks like she’s about to throw something out the window. Before she can figure out a way to actualise her plan, the door opens and closes. It’s a nurse, come to take her blood pressure and check her vitals.

“Good afternoon,” he greets.

“Afternoon,” Lena replies, tight-lipped, echoing Kara’s same sentiment expressed more meekly.

“I see you’ve had a look at your leg. Now, the cast is there to help keep your knee straight, you’ll have it off in about a week,” he explains.

“Not growing back, is it?” Lena makes a lazy attempt at a joke, not ready to take any of this seriously.

“I’m afraid not,” he replies with a forced smile, hollow in the vein of canned laughter. “Maybe next time it’ll remind you to wear your seatbelt.”

“Wait, you weren’t wearing a seatbelt?” Kara asks, exasperated. “Lena, what were you thinking?” There’s just a little too much accusation in her tone, she’s a little too loud.

Lena responds with venom, one-upping Kara on the volume.

“I wasn’t!” she snaps.

She falls back on the bed, regret seeping in. Two words and it’s clear that she remembers _everything_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> honestly overwhelmed w all the positive feedback this fic has gotten!! (even though some of you totally called me on what i was doing, felt like a kid caught with their hand in the cookie jar lmao. YES i will keep piling on the angst before it gets better, yes, i absolutely will, but i promise it's worth it in the end.)  
> i really do appreciate every single comment so, so much, they're incredibly motivating, it's good to know people actually enjoy and i'm not just screaming into the void haha  
> chapter 4 tomorrow!


	4. Watch You Sleep (and listen to you breathe)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you sabulum-p for beta-reading!

**_“_ ** _I don’t want to talk about it.”_

***

Lena’s eyes are closed and she’s taking deep breath after deep breath but she’s not asleep. She just got tired and closed her eyes. How anyone could sleep with Kara pacing around like that is beyond her. She’s hoping if she pretends long enough, her body will eventually get the message and catch up.

About an hour, maybe two, into pretending and Kara’s still pacing. Is she never going to tire herself out?

“Are you asleep?” Kara suddenly asks like it’s a sleepover and they’re 12 again.

Lena doesn’t answer. She’s trying to be and getting into another argument about car safety that isn’t really about car safety with Kara isn’t going to help matters. To Lena’s surprise, Kara keeps talking, though it seems more to herself.

“I can’t sleep,” she says, “just anxious that you’re not going to be there when I wake up. It’s silly but I can’t shake it.” She laughs at herself under her breath. “I’d, uh, like to lie next to you but, uh, a nurse explicitly told me not to do that. You know, it’s funny, actually. Said it totally unprompted, just out of the blue. I was thinking, why’s he telling me this? To be honest, I feel like everyone here is operating on some presumptions. That just because I’m your emergency contact and… proxy and… well, only family– sorry –that we must be...” She trails off. “Well, anyway. I thought he was being silly at first but now I kind of get it. I’m just tired and, I just want to know you’re there. But I can’t, of course, it’ll mess up your lines, whatever that means. His words, not mine. Sorry. I’m just losing my mind here, talking to myself. It’s just been a crazy few days. I really should stop talking, at least one of us should get some sleep. You need it more.”

Silence follows. A part of Lena is hoping Kara will continue. She doesn’t.

Eventually, she does fall asleep. When she wakes up in the morning, Kara is still pacing.

***

Lena is staring at Kara’s signature on the consent form. She requested a copy of it earlier. Kara’s signature is on the second page under a small section titled “Patients who lack capacity to provide consent.” It reads:

Name of Substitute

Decision Maker/s: Kara Danvers

Signature: Kara Danvers

Relationship to patient: Healthcare Agent

Date: 12.10.2019 PH No: 831-277-8609

She glares at the squiggly lines cemented in blue ink for the rest of her life with resentment.

“Are you mad at me?” Kara asks, holed up in her chair.

Lena turns to her and says, “Look. You saved my life. I know you had to.”

Kara sighs in relief. To her dismay, Lena continues.

“And yes. I am mad at you. It’s irrational and unfair but I am. I might be for some time. And, of course, you’re free to leave if that bothers you.”

“You know I’d never walk out on you,” Kara assures.

“Well, we all have our flaws,” Lena drawls with a bitter tint to her tone. As she looks at Kara who has that damned puppy-dog look in her eyes again, she reconsiders her words. She sighs and adds, “No. I’m not mad _at_ you. I’m just mad. Really mad, and that means I’m a little bit mad at everyone but mostly myself.”

***

“How is she?” Alex asks when Kara steps out of the room. Kara hesitates to reply.

“She’s doing better. Still wants to be left alone, though,” she says. The fact that she’s exempt from that statement goes wilfully ignored.

“I’m glad to hear that,” Alex replies, followed by a beat of silence.

“She’s mad at me for the, uh,” Kara gestures.

“It wasn’t your fault, Kara. She can’t be mad at you for that! You saved her life. If anything, it was _her_ fault, she should know to drive safe.”

“It’s _her_ fault that some drunk guy totalled her car?” Kara exclaims. She shrinks down after saying it, muttering, “shouldn’t speak ill of the dead. It was my fault, anyway.”

“How could it possibly be _your_ fault? You just did what you had to do.”

Kara stares at her feet. “We had a fight.” She swallows and looks up. “The night it happened. I said something,” she takes a deep breath, followed by a pained smile. When she speaks again, it’s under her breath, “Bad things, Alex. Bad things. I lashed out. She went for a drive. Now we’re here.”

“ _Jesus_ , Kara,” Alex breathes. Still, she shakes her head and goes, “You’re not responsible for someone else’s actions.”

“I know. I know I’m not but that’s a butterfly effect _I_ set off. If _I_ hadn’t lied, we wouldn’t have had that fight, and if _I_ hadn’t lashed out, she wouldn’t have been in that car or maybe she would’ve been wearing a seatbelt, and if _I_ hadn’t signed that consent form, she would still have both legs. She’d be six feet under with the both of them. But she would still have both. So yes, it is my fault and if I was in her place, I might be mad, too,” Kara concludes, more heated than she was planning to get. Her cheeks have grown flush, the unpleasant kind, feverish in sensation. These past few days have been a too-hot bath that never cools down, forever scalding her red pruning skin as she struggles to breathe through the inescapable steam with a hummingbird heart, slow-motion boiling alive.

“Well, I’m glad to hear she’s doing better,” Alex changes the topic, followed by a beat of silence. She shifts uncomfortably. “Can we talk about when you’re coming back to work?” When Kara opens her mouth to say something, offense taken clear as day in her features, Alex interrupts before she can say anything, “Look. I get that Lena’s your friend and you want to make sure she’s okay but National City needs Supergirl.”

“ _National City_ has managed without Supergirl before. It will manage again.”

“But-”

“If there’s some major crisis, fine, call me and I will come but I am not abandoning Lena like this to stop petty theft!”

“You can’t mean that.”

“Why not? If Superman can move to Argo City indefinitely, surely, I can take a few weeks off.”  
  


“A few _weeks_?”  
  


“Or however long it takes. And, you know what, CatCo can manage without a reporter for a little while, too.”

“Your mind really is made up,” Alex says with sincere surprise in her voice. Kara nods. Whatever it takes. She’s not losing Lena again. Come hell or high water.

***

Lena gets her first solid meal in days since admittance. It’s an underwhelming, unappetising mash of peas with some rice and corn complemented by a stale bread roll and a cup of fruit consisting of six grapes and three pieces of honeydew. Lena eats the grapes and picks at the bread as an orthopaedic surgeon explains the procedure for the reconstructive surgery her wrist needs.

Kara sits by her bed, probably paying more attention to what the doctor is saying than Lena. Once it’s just the two of them again, Kara watches Lena picking at the bread. Her fingers are still stiff but she seems to have more control over them now.

“How are you feeling?” she asks.

“No feelings,” Lena replies without looking up. “I’m just going to take my feelings and put them in my little boxes and never look at them and then one day, I’ll die.”

Kara takes a look at Lena’s unfinished Styrofoam plate.

“You need to eat,” she tells her with a soft, concerned smile.

“So do you,” Lena retorts. “How long have you been wearing that shirt?”

Kara looks at the wrinkled button-down. She hasn’t been home in days. Her hair is a matted mess, former princess curls drooping around her face, strands of her bangs clung to her forehead. Dark shadows are looming underneath her eyes, her lips have cracks that rival many a Grand Canyon.

“Go home, Kara. Take a shower, change your clothes. Get some sleep. If you want to come back, pick up something actually edible on the way **—** oh! And could you drop by my penthouse and bring me my laptop? I dread thinking about the madness L-Corp has descended into in my absence. You still have the key, right?”

“Of course, but-” Kara objects.

“I’ll be fine.”

“But what if-”

“You’re afraid I’m going to die before you get back.” She says it so nonchalantly, a statement instead of a question.

Kara sighs, “Yeah.”

“And you don’t want me to die before we’ve talked about what happened.” Lena lifts a breadcrumb into her mouth.

“Lena, I don’t want you to die at all!” Kara exclaims incredulously. Lena waves it off with a subtle eyeroll.

“Look. I promise I won’t start dying before you get back. Okay?”

“But-”

“No buts,” Lena looks at Kara, “and no puppy-dog eyes. When you get back, we’ll talk.”

Kara sighs in defeat. “Okay. I’ll be back soon,” she says, takes a moment to think about it as she stares at Lena, plants a quick, featherlight kiss on her forehead, just short of her hairline and is out the door before Lena can say anything about it.

She’s back in less than an hour. The ability to fly really comes in handy when your city’s public transportation system is a bit of a mess. When she walks through the door, her hair is still a bit damp and she comes bearing Chinese takeout. She’s balancing everything Lena asked for under her free arm— and by the look of it, more.

Lena wouldn’t admit it at gunpoint but she _is_ glad to see her. A part of her wasn’t expecting Kara to return. And that sweater _does_ look good on her. It’d look homely on just about anyone else but it looks good on her.

Kara puts down Lena’s tech and lays out the takeout over her tray– the hospital food has mysteriously disappeared. She sits down next to her bed.

“You said we could talk.”

Lena really was hoping she’d somehow magically forget. She turns away from Kara with a sigh.

“If you insist.”

“I just want to apologise for those awful things I said.”

“We both said stuff. Apology accepted. Are we done?” To be fair to Lena, she never did purport to excel in the emotional intelligence department.

“Look, I know you’re mad at me.”

“I’m not mad at you for what you said.”

“You’re mad at me for what I did.”

Lena dodges eye contact. “Maybe,” she pauses, “and so what if I am? You’re mad at me, too, can we talk about this another time?”

“What other time?” Kara pleads, “I told myself I’d apologise tomorrow and then before tomorrow could come, I got a call from the hospital telling me you were in a wreck. That almost _killed you_!”

“And we’re back to the seatbelt thing.” Lena rolls her eyes.

“It’s not about the stupid seatbelt!” Kara yells.

And it isn’t. Of course, it isn’t, it never has been. It’s only by a trick of fate’s cruel irony that Lena’s alive to have this conversation. She’d stopped looking both ways before crossing the street months ago, stopped wearing her seatbelt, stopped caring whether she’d had a drink or two before taking her sleeping pills for the night. The familiar annoying buzzing in her head like a fly that wouldn’t go away. Of course she wasn’t going to do anything, that would be terribly off-brand, but if something was going to happen, an accident teetering on self-destruction, well, let it.

“Then what is it about?” Lena asks.

“ _Us_ ,” Kara replies, “We’ve been a mess ever since-”

“Ever since my brother died– because I shot him to protect you –and told me you’d been lying to me for four years?” Lena deadpans.

“Yes. I-I’ve apologised a thousand times. You _know_ I’m sorry, you know I am but we can’t go on like this.”

“Go on like what?” Lena asks, still sardonic, hiding behind layers and layers of ice to conceal the fear creeping under her skin. Is this the part where she’s left alone for good? She knows in her bones that it’s coming. She’s but a ghost tucked into the seabed, haunting the halls of a green-bearded ship at the bottom of a lake that never gives up her dead, the skeleton of a person lost in a cave-diving accident that cannot be retrieved. Now and again, a diver comes to visit and holds her cold bony hands but none can stay and none can take her with. She’s spent so long in this inhospitable ice water mansion that she, herself, has become inhospitable, surely, if returned to the shore, her bones would crumble to dust and become one with the sand dunes. Even Supergirl needs to breathe, even she needs to swim back to the surface and return to the living.

“We fight and then we make amends and then we fight again. And then you almost die and we make amends and then we fight again.”

“Are you breaking up with me?” Lena mocks. She’s not in the mood to cry again. The takeout’s getting cold.

“No! I just, can we just agree to be civil? I know _we’re_ complicated right now but,” Kara puts her hand on Lena’s arm, there’s a spark of electricity when they touch, “can you just let me help you?”

Lena has to take a moment to ponder the proposal. Accepting help feels like admitting defeat. Defeat to what, she’s not sure. But the alternative seems even worse. How crummy it is, needing people.

“Alright,” she breathes.

“Whatever happens, whatever _has_ happened, you’re my best friend and I love you.” Kara smiles.

Lena hums. “Remember when you were little and hurt yourself, and somebody told you to hurt yourself worse in a different place to get rid of the pain?” she shakes her head, “That is all love is to me. Maybe you were right. What you said-”

“No! Okay? No,” Kara shakes her head, “I was _angry_ and I was _wrong_.”

“Maybe we would be better off-”

“No. You know, I’ve been doing _a lot_ of waiting these past few days. Hours upon hours of uncertainty. And it’s been,” Kara’s eyes drop down. She bites her bottom lip and swallows back the painful lump at the back of her throat. She takes a deep breath, her brow furrowing. Trembling, she looks back up at Lena, “ _agonising_. But it also, it did give me a lot of time to think. When minutes turn to hours, there’s _so_ much time to just think back. So, I sat there and everything went silent and, the doctor’s words were echoing back to me about complications and the percentage, they told me how likely I was to lose you forever in,” she shakes her head, “numbers. Cold, hard math. And I thought about that thing I said to you when we last talked, and I thought, you know, what if I had never met you. What if, right?”

She pauses, her features grow neutral. “I wouldn’t be a reporter,” she says and pauses again to gather herself. If she speaks too soon, the lump in her throat that stubbornly reappears every time she bites it back will catch up to her. She takes a deep breath and looks down because she can’t stand looking at Lena when she speaks again, “Maybe you’d be dead. There was that, uh, helicopter crash, remember that? Rao, it feels like there’s a millennium between that day and today. Then again, maybe you’d have survived,”

“I wouldn’t have been in National City in the first place.”

“No?” Kara asks, open-ended. They’re both aware of the implications of that statement but Kara doesn’t want to pry and really, some things go unsaid beautifully.

“No,” Lena replies simply. And that’s all that needs to be said. Implications hung in the air like ornaments on a Christmas tree.

“Well, then you’d be alive someplace else.”

“Or not,” Lena offers and the implications are less beautiful this time but again, they go unexplored. This isn’t a cave they’re ready to dive into today. Cave-diving killed 368 Americans between 1969 and 2007.

“Well, I’d be dead. You saved my life when I was dying of Kryptonite poisoning. Actually, there’s a good chance we’d both be dead. You’ve helped me save the world so many times, if you hadn’t been there, well,” she shakes her head, “I don’t know, actually. The impact you have had on my life is so great that I can’t even imagine a reality where you were not a part of my life. At every turn, you were there and if you hadn’t been, I think I would still be lost in the universe, if there even _was_ a universe to be lost in.”

Lena breathes a chuckle.

“What’s funny?” Kara asks.

“What do you know about quantum entanglement?” Lena asks with the hint of a smile in her voice.

“Still nothing,” Kara caveats with a little eyeroll.

“Well,” Lena takes a deep breath, “the basic idea is that some particles are generated in such a way that their quantum state cannot be described independently of the other,” she says and tilts her head to the side, the corners of her lips dragging themselves upwards as if by force, “Even if they’re really far apart in the universe.”

“So, even,” half-way through the question Kara realises just how cheesy she’s going to sound and fiddles with her glasses, straightening her back to appear more serious, “just want to make sure I’m getting this right,” Lena gives a cheeky nod, “these,” she hums a pause, “particles, from the moment of their creation, they’re tied to each other.”

“Yes,” Lena nods, “and whatever one does influences the other. So much so that they can’t be described independently of the other, in any version of reality. At any distance, any time, always.”

And there’s a lot of implications there, in the matching smiles they wear and Kara’s hand that’s found its way onto Lena’s, that magical spark in Kara’s eyes, but neither of them says anything. Here, suspended in the moment, like matching ornaments on a tree, hoisted up by their own feelings, forever seeking each other in silence.

“You know,” Kara says, “I’d be really messed up if I’d lost you. Not _just_ because you’re my friend and I love you, because,” a pause weighed down by what’s to come. Part of Lena deigns to hope, part of her has resigned that hope long, long ago and is content without it, “I have my sister and our friends and I love them. So much. But they can’t always understand me. Not the way you do. They don’t understand loneliness the way we do, they don’t know what it feels like when you don’t belong. You are the first person who’s ever truly made me feel understood. _Seen_.”

“I know what you mean.” Lena looks out through the blinds. “I think once the dust settles up here, I’m going to be very afraid.”

“Well, you don’t have to do this alone. I’m here for you.” Kara smiles. “I’ll take care of you.”

“It’s rotten work.”

Kara shakes her head. “Not to me. Not if it’s you.”

The take-out has gone cold. They eat it anyway, in silence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i just wanted to say i've been reading all your comments and they've been so encouraging to keep this story going, i'm so glad you're enjoying this angstfest haha  
> i know i joke a lot about being a feedback vampire but it really does mean a tremendous amount and i hope you enjoyed this chapter as well!!  
> also, if you caught the shameless orestes quote, please know that you're my exact kind of person <3   
> chapter 5 tomorrow!


	5. Tiniest Lifeboat

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you sabulum-p for beta-reading (and sorry about ignoring the bulk of your great feedback bc i felt too tired to edit properly, oof)

Lena looks younger in sleep. Same but different. With her commanding presence melted away, she looks smaller, more human, yet just like herself. Sans concealer, her eyes cast a bit of a shadow, a tell-tale sign of one too many sleepless nights. She has a little nick of a scar just above her right eye like a signature. Her dark hair, swept aside, frames her pale face in the moonlight, giving it a subtle glow. She looks like an ocean on a windless night.

Kara’s brow has a furrow knit into it. She’s been counting Lena’s heartbeats like sheep but remains stubbornly awake. By now, she’s memorised every slightest line on her face, every minuscule pigmented mark and spot, the curvature of her hair winding across her clavicle like a river through valleys.

Everything stands still. The flowers on the windowsill – the plumerias are beginning to wilt, she’ll replace them come dawn – move not a leaf nor a petal. Kara brings a glass of water to her lips and tilts the last of it into her mouth. When she puts it back down on the bedside counter it lands with a soft thud. How loud every noise grows in a quiet room.

She checks her watch. It’s well past midnight. Like a loyal old guard-dog, Kara keeps watch.

***

A pair of crutches is resting against the bed, discarded. Next to them stands a walker. Lena is sitting up, one foot on the ground. Directly in front of her stands a nurse. With her stiff but unbroken hand gripping onto the side of her bed, she leans forward, putting more and more weight on the foot.

“Good,” the nurse says.

Lena grips onto the centre of the walker’s front bar and pushes up into a standing position. She rests her splinted wrist on the left handle, next to the nurse’s hand, and brings her good hand to the right handle. It takes her a minute to close her fingers around it but she manages. Together, they lift the walker off the ground and put it down a few inches further from the bed. Lena hops after it. Kara gives her a little cheer that almost earns a smile. She takes a few more steps towards the door with assistance, far more tired than she’d expected to be by the time she sits back down, this time not on her bed but in the chair next to it.

She looks up from the chair to find Kara glowing with pride at the foot of the bed.

***

Lena starts over at the beginning of the page for the seventh time. She lost her focus again and none of the words registered as anything but gibberish. It’s not that she’s not trying her best to pay attention, she’s just tired and the fatigue of focusing her eyes on the page is stealing attention from the words she’s reading. Her head hurts. When she groans in frustration, Kara looks over to her with her brows lifted in question.

“I am so tired of daytime television,” Lena says, putting the book down in defeat, “but I’m too tired to read.”

Kara picks the book off of Lena’s bed and inspects the cover. It depicts paint strokes in differing shades of blue. With a note of wariness to her tone, she makes a suggestion.

“Would you like me to read to you?”   
  


Lena looks at her as though she’s just suggested making an offer on the Mona Lisa. Such things are simply not done in good taste or with a sound mind. Then again, she mellows, rolling the thought over in her head, mulling over it at each angle. She won’t make it past the page by herself and at this point, she’d rather jump out of the window than watch another second of a Lifetime movie or Fox & Friends.

“Sure, why the hell not?”

Kara slips her index finger between the folds of the book where it’s parted by a bookmark and sits down. She begins reading at the top of the page.

“She would not say of any one in the world that they were this or were that. She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, far out to the sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. Not that she thought herself clever, or much out of the ordinary. How she had got through life on the few twigs of knowledge Fraulein Daniels gave them she could not think. She knew nothing; no language, no history; she scarcely read a book now, except memoirs in bed; and yet to her it was absolutely absorbing; all this; the cabs passing; and she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am this, I am that,” her voice glides like honey. The way it rises and falls in its softness, in its lightness like a meadow on a warm summer’s day, it’s among the ordinary, day-to-day things Lena would recognise from a mile away but doesn’t pay attention to often. It feels as much a mandatory part of her life as her morning cup of coffee, made, poured and consumed without a cohesive thought attached but the absence of which feels startling. Listening to her swallow up word after word is much like finding out a single honeybee, in his lifetime, will make only 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey. It recontextualises the whole thing which, at a glance, seems so ordinary in nature but close up grows ever the more special. So delightfully sweet and special yet how familiar, how much like home it feels. How does one even begin to say such a thing, that the universe has long been a place one has felt lost in and at the sound of your voice, one feels finally held and belonging?

“You should voice audiobooks,” Lena says. Kara chuckles, shushes her through her teeth and continues reading.

***

Kara is watering the flowers sitting idle on the windowsill. Lena is watching her move, eating a salad with too many radishes. They’re not in season yet and far too bitter. Kara takes a step back from the windowsill to inspect it from a distance and decides to switch the white and yellow daisies. They look better that way. Lena bites down on another slice of bitter radish. Kara turns around, as she turns, asking Lena:

“What do you think?” Her voice fades off, her features growing concerned. Lena looks behind herself to see what’s causing the grimace but there’s nothing there. “What’s wrong?” Kara asks her.

“Nothing,” Lena replies but it comes out choked.

“You’re crying.”

“Am I?” Lena touches her fingers to her cheek. _Wet. Since when?_ “There are too many radishes.”

“What?”

Lena is staring at the creases in the blue of her blanket. Like a wave, it washes over her. The sobbing. It throws her around like a tiny lifeboat at sea, at the mercy of the storm, already half-way full. She’s heaving. Tears are streaming down her face and she hears the sound of screaming but isn’t sure if it’s coming from her. It doesn’t feel like it’s happening _to her_. _She’s_ lying idle on the ocean floor, staring up at the poor lifeboat struggling to stay afloat, watching the orange swirl into the blue, distorted image with muffled sound. That lifeboat is going under, though, she can tell. There’s no way it’ll stay afloat being thrown around like that.

Kara isn’t much help. She’s doing her best, granted, but there’s only so much telling someone to keep breathing can do.

There’s nothing Lena can do, either. There’s a few hundred feet between her and the surface. Kara’s voice is a distant echo. She’s not in control of her body.

Without warning, like a fish with a hook through its jaw, Lena is pulled from her leisurely ocean floor to the top and though she tries to protest, the more she thrashes against it, the faster it goes. She’s flung right back into action, back into her body, into the raft, clutching onto a slippery neon seat. The waves keep washing over her head, leaving her unable to breathe. She’s shaking and sweating and her heart is pounding out of her chest, she’ll drown in these tears if they don’t stop soon.

She reaches out, trying to grab onto anything stable but nothing seems to work. She clutches onto the sides of her hospital bed but still, the heaving is uncontrollable, still, the air she’s so desperately gulping in isn’t making it to her lungs, like drinking seawater, it leaves her thirstier.

And there’s Kara. Looking into her eyes. Telling her it’s going to be okay. Telling her she’s right there. She’s blurry through the tears, her voice quiet compared to Lena’s own thumping heartbeat.

“Should I call a nurse?” Kara asks. Lena shakes her head. She can’t speak. She wants no one to see her like this, least of all Kara, but she’s already here and she can’t tell her to leave so this is damage control.

Towards the end, it clarifies. The storm clears. The sobs quiet down. The lifeboat stays afloat. She can breathe again. She can see again. And what she sees is that she’s been left drifting alone on the ocean, with land nor ships nowhere in sight. The seagulls gawk overhead. There is no drinkable water. There is no food. Her clothes are soaked from the storm and there’s a freezing cold breeze. _She’s going to die here._ Nothing has ever been clearer. So she weeps some more, in clarity this time, she weeps at the sight of her fate. She’s spent her days blind here and now to finally see is a curse. To look into its terrible eyes and know she will never be free of its presence.

And yet again, there’s Kara, her hands wrapped around her arm. Looking into her eyes. Asking if she’s okay. What a silly question. Of course she’s not.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to call a nurse?” Kara asks, her fingers clearly itching for the red button again. Lena shakes her head violently.

“No,” she breathes and her eyes glass over. No nurse can’t help her. No one can.

***

When Lena is taken into surgery for the third and, fingers crossed, last time, Kara kisses her knuckles before they part like it’s the most natural thing. It goes unquestioned.

Lena stares at the bright lights overhead as the anaesthesia sets in. No one asked her to count to ten. She was kind of expecting them to ask her to count to ten. Then it goes dark.

***

The days blur into one. She spends as much of her time sleeping as she can, only interrupted by hospital staff checking her vitals, giving her medicine, making her get up and do a lap around the room to improve her circulation. She’s making progress, her right hand has regained a full range of motion and she has regained some strength in her left foot. The surgery went well. In a few weeks, she’ll have her left hand back. They tell her it’ll probably never be quite the same but promise she’ll regain most motor function and be able to put weight on it again. They tell her she can get fitted for a temporary prosthesis in a few weeks, that she’ll learn to walk again, that she’ll get to go home. They tell her she’s very lucky. To have survived such an accident, that is, to be making such a good recovery, to have such a great support system. Lena doesn’t think that’s lucky. Winning the lottery is lucky. Being in a car wreck and losing a body part doesn’t sound particularly lucky to her, in fact, it seems like rather crummy fucking luck.

Some days, she’d rather it’d killed her. It’s vengeful thinking, she knows. It’s not nice of her. Can’t help it. People come by with flowers and chocolates and wide smiles expecting her to play the part of the jolly survivor and in everyone’s eyes, all Lena sees is deceit. They tell her to stay strong and she imagines them at her funeral with big black umbrellas and she wonders if any of them would cry. She wonders if they’d feel bad for keeping up the lie so long, or if it wouldn’t even occur to them how their betrayal factored into her demise.

Only Kara stays with her through the bleak of it. Lena sees the fading light in her own eyes reflecting back in Kara’s. She’s the only one who stays past the forced smiles and platitudes, only ever leaving to change, shower and bring food that tastes less like recycled cardboard than the hospital mush, though Lena doesn’t care much for eating these days. _Everything_ tastes like sawdust. Kara waters the flowers and wheels Lena around the hospital day after day even though she looks just as lifeless in spite of it. She doesn’t give up no matter how many times Lena tells her to.

Lena doesn’t talk much. She mostly just stares.

She’d sleep the whole day if she could but lately it’s been harder getting to sleep even with the help of medication. Her eyes have bored so many holes into the ceiling, she fears the whole building’s going to come down on her any day now. She pictures herself being buried under the rubble, suffocating on the clouds of concrete dust. Doesn’t seem too bad, actually.

Everything has bled into one big grey smear. She’s going through the motions of survival but she’s never felt it more meaningless to try. She eats only at the threat of a feeding tube. She stands up and takes her daily five steps only because Kara asks her to and at this point, she feels like she owes her. The anger over Kara’s betrayal has not dissipated as much as faded into the background as yet another meaningless detail. She spends far more of her time sulking in the guilt of being such a burden on her. She’s tried to tell her to leave. She’s tried nice and angry and sad and detached, doesn’t matter how she says it, it doesn’t work. Kara’s glued to her side. So, to alleviate the guilt, Lena gets up and sits in her wheelchair and takes the same tour around the hospital as she does every day. She takes her medication and washes it down with water and when she cries, she tries to do so quietly in the dead of the night as to not wake up Kara sleeping by her side.

Kara sleeps next to her now, in her cold, uncomfortable hospital bed. It barely fits the two of them.

Lena told her to lie next to her once she’d gotten most of her lines out, on a stormy night when Kara’s pacing became too much for her to put up with. It became customary, going unquestioned night after night. Hospitals are rather liminal spaces where a lot that would be questioned in regular life can go about its day undisturbed.

The best part of the day is waking up next to her. Sure, more often than she’d like there’s blonde hair in her mouth and Kara hogs the blanket despite positively radiating heat but there’s a split second every morning when Lena hasn’t fully remembered who or where or why she is yet. It’s the very definition of blissful ignorance. For that split second, she’s just lying in a sunny bed next to a beautiful blonde and everything seems alright in the world. Of course, things come flooding back quite quick and she falls back into her sorrow.

David Mitchell wrote “Grief is an amputation,” but _this_ is a kind of grief in itself. Perhaps they are synonymous.

Kara tries to joke. Lena doesn’t laugh. Kara smiles. Lena doesn’t smile back. But she eats the fries Kara brought even though they taste like candlewax because Kara tells her to eat to get better and Kara wants her to get better and Lena doesn’t think there _is_ such a thing as getting better from this but she feels an obligation to try. So they cycle. Day after day rolls around, another dawn, another bloodwork, until three weeks from the incident, Lena’s doctor walks into her room and tells her she’s getting released tomorrow and to prepare to go home. She talks more about getting fitted for a temporary prosthesis in about a week and a permanent one in a few months, about physiotherapy and about getting her arm cast off in a few weeks, and the splint off her wrist in another few, and how to care for her healing ribs and collarbone at home, and only Kara listens.

Lena isn’t sure she heard her right on the first sentence. The thought of actually going home after spending what has _felt_ like an eternity at the hospital seems surreal. Kara’s eager smile as she sits beside her seems to confirm what she heard but Lena’s still rather sure she’s hallucinating. This feels like a dream and she’s not sure if it’s a good one or a bad one.

Of course, this means she’ll be alone from now on. The immediate threat to her life has passed, it’s pretty clear she’s going to make it even if she’s leaving in a wheelchair. She thinks about her cold penthouse apartment, decorated aptly for a stock-photoshoot. It’s ironic that there’s more life in her hospital room but of course there is. Because Kara has filled it with flowers that smell so nice they give her headaches, and Kara has brought her all her favourite books and Kara has sat next to her every single day and urged her to eat the last potsticker. Kara has breathed life into this space. Her penthouse, in comparison, seems cold and empty and life there seems even more meaningless.

She’s spent weeks infirm in a hospital bed and the world has moved on without her. Things at L-Corp are running smoothly, too much so, even. Of course, she had emergency protocols in place for this sort of event, she couldn’t have her company shut down just because she was forced out of business for any number of reasons but now, it seems like those preparatory measures are working so well she’s no longer needed. As much as she’d like to go back to work, the doctors advise against it for at least a few more months. Lena’s stubborn and most certainly a workaholic but she doesn’t want to rock the boat as a shadow of her former self so she heeds their warnings to stay away. Without work and without the daily fraction of a second of bliss, life feels even bleaker.

But it’s not like she has a choice.

Kara’s excited, clearly. She does all the packing for Lena, all the while eagerly ranting about how much nicer things are going to be at home, how much more comfortable she’ll be and how this is a good sign about how things are going to get better. She talks about how things will be back to normal before she even notices. Lena doubts every bit of that. In fact, she _knows_ that things will never go back to the way they once were.

But it’s not like she has a choice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry abt not updating yesterday as promised, i passed out and had a whole-ass nap at the gym, like that's how tired i was, my profs have been killing me lately  
> chapter 6 tomorrow, hopefully, and thank you to everyone for leaving comments, they've been wonderful!


	6. Crawl Home to You

Kara has carried everything down and packed it into the trunk of the car waiting for Lena. Now it’s just her.

She gets up by herself and sits in her wheelchair and Kara rolls her out of her room. There’s an electric one waiting for her at home alongside everything else her doctor listed as “might be helpful” and Kara dutifully took down with a pen and paper. But until then, she still needs someone to push her to the elevators and through the doors.

The fresh air in her lungs and the sun on her face are welcome after far too much time stuck indoors. But then they get to the car.

Kara opens the door for her and Lena freezes.

“I’m not getting in there,” she says and swallows. As much as she fanaticises about the sweet release of death, this is _not_ how she wants to go. She’d rather _hop_ there on one leg or lay down on the concrete and wither away, watching shoes pass her by, than get in another car.

Kara kneels down in front of her and takes her hands. In the abrasive daylight, the gesture seems much more alien, much too intense.

“Hey, look at me. It’s going to be fine, okay? I understand you’re anxious but nothing bad is going to happen. I promise.”

“You can’t promise anything,” Lena breathes, “I am _not_ getting in there,” she shakes her head. All the fresh air seems to have disappeared, there’s only the fumes of the cars speeding past them, infecting her lungs, suffocating her from the inside out.

“Look at me.”

Lena does. Kara sighs.

“Breathe with me, okay?”

Lena nods and follows Kara as she takes deep breath after deep breath. Drop by drop, the oxygen returns to her lungs.

“Better?” Kara asks. Lena gives a little nod. “It’s going to be fine, okay? It’s a short distance. This guy’s been your driver for years and never had one accident. He’ll drive extra carefully, I made him promise. He’ll drive like you’re a Fabergé egg. And I’m right here. I will _never_ let anything like that happen to you ever again, you hear me? I’m going to protect you. Do you trust me to do that?”

Lena sighs. She gives a reluctant nod. Kara helps her into the backseat and sits in the passenger seat herself. And nothing happens except for the leather acquiring permanent indentations where Lena was gripping onto it. They arrive at Lena’s address safe and sound.

Kara helps her out the car and into the building. They ride the elevator all the way up to the top floor. Upon opening the door, Lena finds her place looking the exactly how she left it. She doesn’t know what else she was expecting, a cleaner comes on a regular basis and it looks haunted on a good day. _She’s home._

Kara immediately gets to work unpacking. Lena sits down on her couch and stares at her coffee table covered in decorative magazines and a few recent CatCo’s. She’s always lived at work more than anywhere but it’s bordering on absurd how far from home the penthouse feels after only a few weeks of being away. The thought of being stuck here for weeks is weighing on her still when Kara finishes unpacking. She offers to make tea or coffee and Lena doesn’t respond, wondering when she’s going to go home. She imagines Kara must be eager to. She wouldn’t blame her. Kara settles for tea (Lena has one of those coffee machines that look like they require a course and a permit to operate.)

“This place really has a lovely view,” Kara comments. Lena looks out through the windows and all she sees is a city eager to eat her up as yet another tabloid story, another freakshow to gawk at, crammed between _Jessica and Justin’s locker room hook-up_ and _High-waisted jeans: yes or no?_ She looks at the skyline and all she can think about is how polluted the air is from all the traffic.

They drink their tea in silence and when the pot’s been emptied out, surely then Kara will leave. But she doesn’t. She sits idle on Lena’s couch as though waiting for something. Is she expecting Lena to tell her to leave? _Well, alright then–_ but before Lena can say anything, Kara comes out of her daze with a wistful sigh and says something.

“Netflix?”

It’s a simple suggestion that comes awfully naturally. Lena’s left quite dumbfounded by it. Well, she supposes it couldn’t hurt to have her stay a little longer, just to watch a movie and have a bite and then surely, she’ll be on her way.

“Sure,” she says, “your pick.”

Kara puts on a movie and orders take-out, all the while Lena is watching her, in awe of how natural all this seems to be to Kara. And the credits roll and the dishes get loaded into the dishwasher but Kara doesn’t leave. Lena keeps expecting her to stand up, thank her for a lovely evening and walk out the door but she just _doesn’t_.

Eventually, Lena tires of the odd shared silence and decides to take matters into her own hands.

“Right, I think I’ll head to bed, then.”

“Do you need help?” Kara asks without missing a beat. Lena grabs her one crutch and stands up on her own. It looks rather effortless by this point though it’s the furthest thing from.

“No, I think I will manage. It’s just a few steps,” she turns to leave, “Goodnight then. Lock the door on your way out.”

She makes her way to the bedroom, leaving Kara behind. As she gets into bed, she hears Kara rummaging around in her apartment. The day has tired her out and the contrast between the uncomfortable hospital bed and her soft and comfortable one eases her transition into sleep. She’s out before she even knows it.

When she wakes up in the morning and limps into the kitchen for her morning coffee, she’s startled to find Kara curled up asleep on her couch.

***

Kara doesn’t leave the next day, either. She’s staring out the window, perfectly content on Lena’s couch the next morning like a _service dog_ eagerly waiting to be called on.

Lena is having a staring-contest with her faint reflection in cold coffee. She swirls the liquid and it disappears. This is about the time she’d normally shower. Except that normally there isn’t half as much strategizing involved. Normally, there isn’t any strategizing at all, it’s a bloody shower, get in, get out.

For one, the splint on her wrist cannot get wet under any circumstances. This had seemed a rather easy thing to prevent when the nurse was explaining it to her. All she had to do was seal it in plastic, saranwrap and surgical tape would do the trick. She has both laid out in front of her on the kitchen counter. What she’d failed to consider at the time was how difficult this would be to accomplish with the use of only one hand.

She really doesn’t want to ask Kara for help. Not after everything she’s already done. Getting home was supposed to be a step towards regaining her independence.

So, she wrestles with the plastic until her forehead is gleaming and she’s heaving with exasperation. Sighing, she throws it on the counter in defeat.

“Kara?”

“What is it?” comes a response without missing a beat.

Lena sighs, “Can you help me with something?” Easily her least favourite sentence in the English language.

“Of course!” Kara replies, again, a little too quick, a little too eager and loud.

“I just need to get this thing over the cast.”

“Right, let me get that for you,” Kara says, unravelling saranwrap with enviable ease. Lena dodges eye contact, her eyes fixated on the counter.

“All done,” Kara chirps. Lena takes a look at her arm, moves it around to test the integrity and determines the covering structurally sound with the mental remark to order one of those shower gloves for casts online with same-day delivery as soon as she gets out of the shower.

“Thanks,” she mumbles and reaches for her crutch.

“Do you need help?” Kara asks.

“No, no,” Lena rushes to reply, “I’ll be fine.”

She wants to prove to Kara that she can manage perfectly well on her own, she’s hungry for her independence back. So, she limps into the shower and locks the door after herself. Leaning on the edge of her bathtub, she wiggles out of her shirt and steps out of her skirt. In her birthday suit, she leans the crutch against the door and hops towards the stall.

There’s a shower seat waiting for her. She glares at it before sitting down with a sigh. These things are meant for _old ladies_ , she thinks. Old ladies and _introducing_ , Lena Luthor!

She turns on the faucet and cold water hits her in the face. It takes a moment for it to warm up, so she sits, waiting, head thrown back so the lukewarm water’s splashing on her chest instead, one hand gripping the edge of the chair. Once it’s warm enough, she reaches for the shampoo. _Damn it!_ The shelf is too high for her to grab it while seated. _Okay! Okay_. She can figure this out. She’ll just stand up real quick, grab onto the faucet, stand up, grab it, sit back down. It’s fine, she doesn’t need help.

So, she stands up. Now, being a scientist, Lena does, on an intellectual level, know that water has a pesky tendency of negating any natural friction smooth surfaces such as the tiles on her bathroom floor provide. And speaking in broad strokes, she’s pretty good at applying theoretical knowledge to the real world. This, however, does not appear to be the case this time and she ends up slipping and falling on her ass.

First, _shock_. She gives herself a look-over: everything seems intact. It seems she got lucky not to fall on any pre-broken or particularly important bits, though she’s going to have a nasty bruise on her backside. Emergency avoided, second order of business: _How the fuck is she supposed to get up?_

She tries and fails and tries and tries again and doesn’t get any more than into a sitting position on the floor, leaning against the wall of the shower stall. _Brilliant!_ That, and she gets _tired_. Exhausted all options, she just _sits there_ , like a rat on a burning ship, frozen, trying to decide whether to jump ship and drown or burn alive, clearly out of favourable options.

She sits until the water runs cold.

“Lena?” comes a welcome yet dreaded voice, muffled by the door and the sound of running water, “You’ve been in there a while. Everything okay?”

And there are no good answers so Lena pauses, sighs, and says, “No.”

“Are you hurt?” Kara asks, increasingly concerned.

“No, no. Fine, I just,” Lena trails off.

“What is it?”

_I’ve fallen and I can’t get up. Sexy. For Christmas, get me jewellery: a LifeCall pendant._

“Just a bit vertically challenged at the moment,” she tries to brush it off with a joke. It doesn’t land.

“Do you need help?” Kara poses the dreaded question. With a sigh, Lena surrenders the dreaded answer.

“Yes.”

A pregnant pause.

“Can I come in?” Kara asks, lowering her voice.

“Yeah, sure.” _What has she got to lose?_

Kara opens the door that Lena locked with ease, fumbling an apology. The beige figure of Lena solidifies as the steam escapes through the crack in the door, Kara averts her gaze. She takes a cautious step closer.

“You sure you’re not hurt?”

“Yeah, nothing’s broken,” Lena replies, adding a mumbled, “except my dignity.”

Biting the bullet, Kara looks at Lena lying on the floor, dragging her eyes above Lena’s torso with such force she almost fears it’ll turn into laser vision. There isn’t enough air in the room. _Probably just the steam,_ she tells herself. She clears her throat.

“Right, let’s just get you up!”

“Would be great,” Lena says, tight-lipped.

“Is it okay if I,” Kara begins, taking a few steps closer until her toes are teetering on the thin line of black rubber outlining the stall’s doorway, “step inside?”  
  


Lena gives her a nod. Kara steps inside, turning off the running water.

“Can I, uh, is it okay if I, like, pick you up?” she asks, stumbling over her words like roadblocks. There’s water still dripping from the faucet, the back of her shirt is wet.

Lena looks away and mutters a reluctant, “Sure.”

“Okay. I’m just, just going to, just do it, I guess,” Kara says.

“Could you maybe throw me a towel first?” Lena asks.

“Oh! Oh, of course, yeah, of course.”

Kara fetches the nearest towel and hands it over, staring at the floor like a gay teenager in a high school locker room. Lena wraps it around herself to the best of her ability.

“Okay,” she says.

Kara plucks her from the ground with ease, both of their gazes averted, both of their cheeks flushed. Once she has Lena in a bridal carry, she looks around, unsure what to do next. “Uh, where should I put you, where do I put you down?”

Lena takes a moment to think.

“If I could just get the crutch, I’d be fine to stand on my own,” she says.

“Alright,” Kara replies, walking them over to the doorway where it’s leaning on the wall. “Can you grab it?”

Lena can and does. The grip in her hand, she smiles and turns to Kara. Their eyes meet. The butterflies bubble up in Lena’s throat and she looks away.

“You can put me down now.”

Carefully, Kara lowers her to the ground, her arm around Lena’s back for support.

“What happened?” she asks.

“Oh, I tried to grab the shampoo. Turned out to be a mistake,” Lena replies and tries her best to laugh at herself. “Slipped.”

Kara removes her hand from Lena’s back.

“I don’t even know why I bothered, only got one arm and holding it above my head for more than a minute would be an _accomplishment_ at this point,” Lena adds in a self-deprecating manner.

“Could’ve just asked me for help,” Kara says, “it’s why I’m here, isn’t it?”

“What, to wash my hair?” Lena jokes, eager for this conversation to be over.

“To help you.”

Lena looks at Kara, all too sincere. She breathes a self-deprecating laugh and rolls her eyes back.

“God, I was really hoping to get by on my own,” she admits.

“There’s no shame in needing help.”

Lena hates how obvious that seems to be to Kara, and she hates how she’s wrong because for Lena, there _is_ shame. There is nothing but shame.

“You just need to ask,” Kara adds.

_Well, maybe just the once._

***

So, Kara doesn’t leave that day. Or the one after that, or the one after that. Three days. That’s how long it takes Lena to crack under the tension and ask her about it. She waits until afternoon when they’re both comfortable, sitting at the table, eating lunch and drinking coffee. “Lunch” is really just sandwiches because Lena is tired of take-out but too tired to actually cook.

“So, what is this?” she asks in an attempt to keep things nonchalant. She’ll admit, she has no idea what the endgame to all this looks like but she’s pretty sure it’s not Kara sleeping on her couch forever.

“What do you mean?” Kara replies with a question and takes a bite of her sandwich.

“I just mean, well, don’t you think it’s time you went home?”

“Do you want me to leave?” Kara’s brow furrows.

“No. No, I just,” Lena hesitates, “I mean, you can’t stay here forever.”

Kara responds with an awkward laugh and tries to shrug it off.

“Well, of course not but I promised I’d take care of you. Just until you get back on your feet.” Lena is generous enough to pretend not to notice the foot-in-mouth disease Kara is suffering from.

“But what about your job, what about _Supergirl_?” Lena protests. “It could be weeks before I’m,” she pauses, trying to find a better way to put it and finding none, “back of my feet. _Foot_?”

Kara shrugs.   
  


“Nearly every other city manages without a superhero. National City has managed without Supergirl before, I’ve talked to Alex, the DEO has things under control. And I have lots of vacation time saved up at CatCo. They’ll be fine without me for a few weeks, Lena, so don’t worry about that, okay? I’m here as long as you need.”

Lena shakes her head.

“I don’t want to keep you from living your life. Besides, I can manage on my own, I could hire a carer.”

“Lena, _do_ you want me to leave?”  
  


“No. I, yes. No. I don’t know, okay? I don’t want to be a burden.”

“You’re not a burden!”

“Aren’t I? It seems like I’m your full-time job. You didn’t sign up for this, and I didn’t either but unlike me, _you_ could opt out and forgive me for asking you to consider that before making my couch your permanent residence.”

“Look, if you’re really worried about that, you can kick me out and hire someone. But I’m always going to be here for you. I don’t mind. I’m here because I want to be, because you’re my friend. I care about you, you’re not a burden to me. And,” Kara sighs, “I don’t want you to feel alone.”

“Well, I’m _not_ alone. I’m doing just fine,” Lena says through gritted teeth.

“ _Are you?_ Because the one thing going through all this has taught me is how alone you must’ve felt after you found out.”

“Oh,” Lena breathes, anger welling up in the tips of her fingers, “oh, so this is about your guilt. You feel bad about lying and you feel bad about that fight and you feel bad that I’m _all alone_ _without the Power of Friendship_ and you think you can fix your guilt by doting on me like a child? Am I close?”

“No! And yes, and no!” Kara sighs. “I’m sorry, okay? Yes, I feel bad but that’s not just why I’m here. Just going through all this has made me realise a lot of things, it’s really reminded me how much I care about you.”

“Oh, golly. Good. All I needed to do to remind you of that was almost die and lose a limb, maybe I should’ve tried that sooner,” Lena’s fuming, exasperated, her fingers itching for her coffee cup to throw it off the table like a petulant cat. “ _Going through all this_ ,” she quotes Kara, mocking her, “I’m sorry, were _you_ in that car, did _you_ lose a leg? You’re not going through _shit_. You don’t have to be here!”   
  
“Sounds to me like you don’t want me here. Do I take up _that much_ space? _Good Rao_ , why can’t you just let people help you?” Kara all but yells.

“Because I _hate_ needing people!” Lena replies, more honest than she wanted to be.

There’s a silence pulsating with tension as Kara does her best to cool down before replying. Lena is in no state to storm off on her now but she knows better than to be careless with her words now. With a sigh, she starts over.

“It also made me realise how alone you must’ve felt. They asked me about your family and I–”

“You realised I didn’t have any?” Lena deadpans.

“No.”

Kara puts her hand on Lena’s, not daring to intertwine their fingers, just letting the weight of her palm sit on Lena’s before she continues.

“It made me realise _I_ was your family. And so were Alex and Brainy and,” she bites her lip and her eyes drop down, “but I lied to you and, by extension, so did they. I was the link to the only family you had left and then I took that away and, I see now how that made you feel.”

“Like it was all a big lie.”

“Like you’d been alone this whole time.”

“A lie that I killed my _actual_ brother for, that I sent my mother,” the word rolls off her tongue like venom, like she doesn’t want to call her that but doesn’t know how else to say it, “to prison for. For _life_ ,” she chuckles bitterly, “everyone else I’d ever loved was gone by that point and I gave up the last family I had left because I was so sure I’d found a new one. One that wouldn’t betray me.”

“Right,” Kara looks down, a hint of puppy-like shame in her features, “and you know I never meant to make you feel that way, right? I never wanted to hurt you and I, I never want you to feel alone. If there’s anything I know, it’s what it’s like to feel alone and like you’ll never find a place where you belong, a home. I felt that way for such a long time after I was sent to Earth. It was awful. But I was lucky to have people that made me feel welcome, who took me in and made me feel like maybe, maybe I could belong here after all,” Kara says with a small, near-apologetic smile.

“You know, that’s how Lex made me feel when I was first adopted by the Luthor’s. And you know how that ended.”

“Yes, I do.”

“And even after that, even after that, I grew to trust people and I’d be lied to again and again and again until I swore off trust as a concept. And then I met _you_. And, you know, I was hesitant but you, you were persistent, for four years you worked to get my guard down and you _did_. And then, well, I found out that I’d been delusional to think I’d actually developed some kind of lie detector that’d keep me from getting hurt again. And,” her eyes fall shut and she swallows the sentence like a shot of Everclear, “I was so mad you. I was so mad that I’d been lied to again. And I know, I know you didn’t mean to hurt me but,”

“I did.”

“And I,” Lena’s voice quivers, she shakes her head, “I shouldn’t have reacted the way I did. I know what I did was wrong and I know there’s no excuse but I just,” she sniffles and rolls her eyes as far as she can into the back of her head to keep the tears from falling, “I was so hurt. And I never wanted anyone to feel like that, I never wanted anyone to have to feel so lonely and sad and angry and broken ever again so I went ahead and played God. You know, mental illness runs in the family.”

“We’re well past that.”

“Are we? You were _so_ mad at me for Non Nocere and now it feels like we’re just glossing over it as if nothing ever happened. And I think that’s you feeling guilty, and I think _this_ is you feeling guilty and there is nothing in this world that I hate more than pity. Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful for all your help and it’s not that I don’t _enjoy your company_ , I just don’t want you growing to hate me over this.”

“Why would I hate you?” Kara asks like it’s absurd but Lena is dead serious.

“Don’t pretend like you’re _just fine_ with quitting your jobs for an unknown amount of time to be a round-the-clock carer for someone you’re repressing your resentment for out of guilt.”

“I don’t _resent_ you.”

“Well, what if you start to?”

“I couldn’t. I wouldn’t know how.”

“Yeah, well, time’s a pretty great teacher.”

“Look, I don’t care what happened, I just want to put it all behind us. If anything, almost losing you made me realise I _really_ don’t care what happened in the past because you’re my best friend and I love you.”

“I hate when you say that,” Lena scoffs. Kara gives her an incredulous smile, wounded puppy style.  
  
  
“Why?”  
  


“Because,” she shrugs, shakes her head, “because you seem to know what that means and I don’t.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry abt the cliffhanger it's not some flash of genius writer move i'm just tired and insanely busy trying to get out updates semi-regularly, i'll try to get chapter 7 out before the end of the month,,  
> comments still religiously appreciated


End file.
